


voyages

by agonies (Hyb)



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Body Worship, Complicated But Enthusiastic Consent, Explicit Sexual Content, Gratuitous Pining, M/M, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Mentioned Casual Sex, Nonlinear Narrative, Pon Farr, Rough Sex, Wet & Messy, a somewhat more serious fic than these tags would imply, alternate universe star trek but no trekkie no problem, amok time au, excessive hand appreciation, jihoon does not have tentacles, mentioned minor and historical character death, mentioned tentacles, now for the sexy bits, vulcans don't speak in contractions rip me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-03
Updated: 2020-02-17
Packaged: 2021-02-19 16:16:20
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 21,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22313806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hyb/pseuds/agonies
Summary: What Mingyu thinks, after the door closes in his face, is that things might be different now. If he'd been braver, when it counted.
Relationships: Kim Mingyu/Lee Jihoon | Woozi
Comments: 108
Kudos: 286
Collections: WIP OLYMPICS: WINTER 2019/20





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lacquer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lacquer/gifts).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Stardate: following the reboot films example, the stardate format is the year, followed by the day of that year. So February 28th, 2259 would be appear as 2259.59
> 
> See _gorgeous_ Vulcan Jihoon [here](https://twitter.com/kyuthiighs/status/1224488872358359043?s=19) & [here](https://twitter.com/kyuthiighs/status/1224373544177610753) & [here](https://twitter.com/kyuthiighs/status/1224461660032770051?s=20)

_Stardate 2259.58_

What Mingyu thinks, after the door whispers shut in his face, is that things might be different now. If he’d been braver, when it counted. He might be standing on the other side. If he had reached out and brushed Jihoon’s fingertips with his own. Maybe prayed, like some kind of sense memory from before his parents died.

The annals of Starfleet are vast, and living on a ship lightyears from home affords the time and patience for research. He’s read as much on Vulcan physiology as he could find, private as they are with their science and their secrets. Overcoming embarrassment, he even borrowed Wonwoo’s credentials for the more laborious medical journals. He hoards what he learns in scraps: the Vulcan heart is located on the right side of the torso, between the ribs and the cradle of the pelvis, where the human liver would be found; Vulcan blood is colored green by hemocyanin, a compound of copper rather than iron; Vulcans are significantly stronger than humans, maybe even three times more, and are estimated to live twice as long if not longer. 

The Vulcan race are very particular about hands, Mingyu knows. (This is a lie. He doesn’t know what other Vulcans are like. He only knows Jihoon, elusive, singular.) Hands are the conduits of telepathic communication, densely populated by nerve endings. They are charged with meaning, even erotic, if the rumors are true. When he imagines lacing Jihoon’s fingers with his own, a sympathetic electric thrill sizzles up his spine.

To take Jihoon’s hand and not let go would be to say _please stay._ There would be no taking it back.

  
  
  


Once Mingyu asked him if Vulcans dreamed, and Jihoon said they could go without sleep for weeks at a time. When Mingyu accused him of dodging the question, he replied that it was a peculiar thing to ask. Which was no answer at all.

  
  
  


_Stardate 2259.55_

All popular advice to the contrary, Mingyu has always made his best life decisions after breakups. He took up fencing. He applied to Starfleet. He let a classmate stretch three of her tentacles inside him until he saw stars.

And when the opportunity came, after his promotion to lieutenant, he joined a five year deep space exploratory mission aboard the _Vela._

That won’t be quite how he relays the official version of his life, of course. Mingyu has given a lot of thought to legacy. Hao used to tease that it took him two years to read one book, but the truth was he referred back to Captain Son’s memoirs from 2189 like a sacred text. Like advice from the older brother he never had.

He found a printed copy in a basement stall, wandering Shanghai the week before his first classes at the academy. There were other books in the Korean bin, plucked up on whim and nascent homesickness, but if he ever read them he can’t recall. The pages of the memoir were heavily annotated in Korean as well, he found, comforting as he looked ahead to a career conducting himself in Standard. If he were prone to believing in signs, he might have found one there. It didn’t take long, however, to intuit that a member of Son’s crew had gotten their hands on the book. Their scrawl in the margins read like the other half of a private conversation.

What he learns from Son Hyunwoo is: when a mission is successful, credit the crew, never yourself. When something goes horribly wrong, blame yourself, never your crew. Sometimes the additions in faded pen will object _bullshit_ or _it wasn’t your fault._ One simply read _I’m sorry,_ though he couldn’t guess who was apologizing or for what, not even after combing the passage back three times. Where Son Hyunwoo suggested meditation to distract the mind from hunger during a period of strict rationing, awaiting emergency supplies, blue pen mocks _you said you’d eat the next ensign who complained._

“I’ll cry if the replicators still can’t get fried chicken right, this is inhumane,” he tells Jihoon. Vulcans are vegetarians, of course, and this one patently unsympathetic to his struggle, watching him peel off a bite with his front teeth, whine like a dog, and chew in small resentful increments. Mingyu has always wondered if synthetic meat ought to count, organic matter transformed into new cellular structures on demand. But far be it from him to question Jihoon’s beloved asceticism. 

“It is chicken and it appears to be fried,” Jihoon demurs, with a prim bitchy little sip of his broth. It smells so spicy that Mingyu’s throat itches with the urge to cough. It must be hotter than usual, even Jihoon’s brow is sheened in sweat, but of course he doesn’t complain. “Your criticisms are subjective.”

Their supper is very late, their shift ended. His uniform smells stale, his feet are swollen and overwarm in his boots. He’s tired. How long has he been so tired. Still, in the dim quiet mess hall he indulges hope that no one will plunk down beside them to confer with the first officer at his leisure. Mingyu thinks everything could be good again, just like this, with a faint bluish light limning one side of Jihoon’s face and an unspoken current of understanding between them.

“It’s a Saturday night,” or so their earthbound timekeeping persists, “this is supposed to be a comfort food, and the skin is soggy. It screwed up your soup, too, I can see you.” He prods his tray in exaggerated dejection, angling for the twitch of an almost eyeroll — a victory every time he can make Jihoon crack. But his brows are pinching together, instead, so Mingyu laughs. He’s laying it on too thick but he can’t seem to stop, like gravity is dragging him. “But I’ll leave that out of the log. Not very inspiring to complain about the food, is it?”

“You are not on duty,” Jihoon observes, which is a Vulcan admission of curiosity if ever there was one. No record is required of Mingyu, he means, not after a quiet shift on the bridge, and so he waits for an explanation. 

“Later,” Mingyu waves a (soggy) drumstick grandly. “When I’m captain. Have to leave a respectable account for posterity.” 

“The captain’s log is an inviolable record of events regardless of opinion or personal feeling.” As always, Jihoon’s poker face is formidable. He doesn’t comment on how many times Captain Choi and the ship’s chief medical officer have shouted themselves hoarse in med bay only for Seungcheol to march stiffly back to his cabin and record a placid account of the latest away mission and his resultant injuries, minus any snark from his physician. 

( _Someday I’m going to let him bleed right out of his thick skull,_ Wonwoo might seethe later, professional composure eroded, and Mingyu would sigh through his nose, unfasten his mouth from Wonwoo’s dick, and listen to him rant about their captain until they jerked off absently and fell asleep.)

“So you think I wouldn’t be a good captain?” He’s teasing, but he can’t quite chase a shade of earnestness from the question. Vulcans don’t lie, or so Jihoon has told him. Mingyu can’t pretend not to care what he thinks. As second in command of the _Vela,_ son of an ambassador, prodigy of Starfleet, Jihoon of Vulcan is beyond reproach. He wrote textbooks when he was an instructor at the academy, designed new training protocols. Most of all, Seungcheol listens to him when he can’t hear anyone else.

Jihoon would not follow a captain he perceived as unfit, which means he must constantly be weighing each officer’s worthiness of rank. Mingyu knows him. That analytical brain doesn’t have an off switch for inconvenient observations or respect for hierarchy.

“That is not what I said. You know this, and you are hoping to be flattered.” Funny, how some people still believe Vulcans don’t experience emotion just because they’re guarded in how they show it. How they let it influence their actions. He feels the weight of Jihoon’s fondness like the sun on his back.

“So you think I’ll be a _great_ captain,” Mingyu grins, dizzy like he’s been holding his breath. Maybe he has been, these past few months. Jihoon’s mouth twitches. There’s an uncanny greenish flush at the tips of his pointed ears and Mingyu has a moment to think _oh_ and _please_ before the ship’s artificial gravity fails and all the metal around them screeches like some living thing.

  
  
  


_Stardate 2258.227_

“I know you aren’t poking around my warp core when every door says No Kim Mingyu Past This Point,” Vernon barks, breaking off from misting his plants under their artificial lights to spray Mingyu like an errant cat. He’s smiling, but it feels like a threat with all his teeth out like that.

“Don’t be rude, I didn’t touch anything,” Mingyu huffs back, holding his empty hands up as proof. He did poke around the replicator in the engineering break room, to be fair, but only because he suspects them of holding out modifications for certain recreational greens. “And I’m not a jinx.”

“Why do you think saying that makes it better?” He ducks and glances overhead as if Mingyu might tempt hail or locusts into space under his own cursed power. “Took me three days to stabilize the magnetic field last time you didn’t-jinx it. You so much as bat your pretty eyes at my antimatter injector, no that was not a euphemism, and I’ll do permanent damage to _your_ antimatter injector. Now that’s a euphemism.”

“I steer this ship.” He can feel his lower lip beginning to jut out, but sometimes that works in his favor. “I could land her on a bee’s wing.”

“And I make it go boom,” Vernon agrees patiently, like placating a toddler. He snags Mingyu’s elbow and steers him back toward the exit. A pair of ensigns in crisp red shirts turn the corner, spot them, and swiftly walk backwards out of sight. Mingyu doesn’t much appreciate the superstitious warding gestures sketched in his direction. “What do you want that you’d risk being fed to my Mandalorian flytrap? Stop doing that thing with your face, you know damn good and well that wasn’t a euphemism either. Shouldn’t you be peeling grapes for the commander or whatever you two do?”

“He’s playing chess with Captain Choi,” Minygu mutters, too quick and too stiff. He flexes a phantom ache from the palm of his left hand, his dueling hand. There is no scar.

Vernon pauses in his stride. His crooked, lingering grin, warmed up to their bickering, slides away like snowmelt. He eyes Mingyu up and down, winces at whatever he finds there, and finally thumps his shoulder in sympathy. Blood warmth blooms briefly under his skin at the point of contact, then fades. 

“Thought you would’ve,” Vernon begins, only to break off and muffle a cough with the back of his wrist. It’s very quiet, down here, in the echoing openness at the heart of the ship he calls home. The towering curve of the warp core housing like the arch of a church. “Well, you should’ve said so. Come on, you can water my ficuses, they’re tough enough to handle you. But one sneeze at my warp core and so help me, I’ll tie you in a knot.” 

“Is that one a euphemism?” Mingyu can’t resist asking, trying to paint yellow and bright over the awkwardness. It doesn’t matter if he’s made clever linguist Boo teach him tri-dimensional chess, or bullied everyone he could into helping him practice under a vow of secrecy. It doesn’t matter at all, not if he can’t work up the nerve to ask Jihoon to play with him.

“Maybe,” Vernon shrugs with humbling indifference. “Depends on your luck.”

  
  
  


_Stardate 2256.29_

Maybe the moment he missed was during shore leave, their first after the _Vela_ embarked from Earth. Perched up in the fifth floor of a blue lit club, its inner balconies encircling a ten storey fall of rushing water and hanging vines with fragrant purple flowers that Doctor Jeon warned him four times not to touch unless he wanted an erection so severe it would require medical intervention. Under the arches of cold and unfamiliar constellations, Mingyu was beginning to do the math. Hazard of the job, of years calculating trajectory by hand under the watchful eyes of his professors. A few months down. Every day and hour and minute of five years left to go. The ship’s doctor was handsome, and Mingyu suspected that all the talk about erections dangerous or otherwise was a hint that he ought to go find him and buy him a drink. That was what he ought to do, before he took his newly earned Federation credits to the nearest holo-booth and called Minghao. 

Instead he threw down a disgusting chunk of his pay on an exotic bottle from the top shelf, to the amusement of his many-eyed barkeep, and sat like his feet were welded to the floor, like he would never stand again. Captain Son would say, don’t drink to excess. Even when off duty, even if you’re certain you can get a sobering shot from med bay. Wars have caught fire in minutes. Never be so inebriated that you can’t serve your crew.

And the note below said, cramped small and tight, _Andromeda_ and not long after it said _you always wanted a fuck more than a drink anway._ Mingyu could recite the notes by heart, just like the printed pages, but only ever to himself. It always sobered him up, personally, to remember how posthumously promoted Admiral Son went down with his ship, in the evacuation of Enceladus, shielding civilian craft from Romulan warbirds. There’s a plaque all about it at the academy, near the running path. 

(There was another plaque, on the engineering campus. Somewhere there would be his parents, their names in raised bronze letters among all the others, but he could never make himself go look.)

He imagined the person who read the book just to chase Captain Son’s voice. Wondering if they died alone, with no one who knew better than to donate the dogeared copy when packing up the possessions left behind. He wondered, privately, if anyone would ever love him enough to cling to any trace of him, to argue with his ghost, to say _sorry_ and _it wasn’t your fault_ as if he could hear them. Or if he died in a strange new system, frozen or asphyxiated or vaporized, if his entire life would be summed up in a dry and dutiful service at his uncle’s house and Minghao explaining, tactful, _oh, I knew him before I met my husband._

Somewhere between thumbing the ring Hao gave him before he left (for a talisman of home, sweet and thoughtless and cruel) and reckoning that he was much, much too drunk and not planning on stopping, someone sat down beside him.

The word was that the _Vela’s_ chief science officer was standoffish, but Mingyu had his doubts. The first Vulcan to join Starfleet, breaking with a tradition of lofty detachment, Jihoon (and was that his first name or his last, and would anyone ever have the nerve to ask) had come up through the academy with newly minted Captain Choi. They had names for each other that no one else used. Sometimes Jihoon (never Woozi, not to anyone but the captain and Doctor Jeon, their dashing little triumvirate) would say something stern beneath his breath and Captain Choi would shake with trying not to laugh at the helm. Off duty he’d snort so hard he threatened to topple over and slap Jihoon’s back like he’d take their compact commander down with him.

He might be a hard man to know, his tone so dry that fresh nervous ensigns would flinch if he called their names, but he didn’t seem unkind. Not when he tugged the bottle of Eridan whiskey to himself and proceeded to drink _half,_ sparing Mingyu’s liver and his pride. Not that alcohol did a thing for Vulcan physiology, but Mingyu didn’t know as much at the time.

“Are you considering any rash displays? You are very pink,” Jihoon murmured, his lower lip wet. “If you conduct yourself in a manner unbefitting your uniform, I will be forced to mark you for a demerit.” The condescension should have pissed him off, but in the blue shadows he could have sworn Jihoon’s eyes were warm.

“Just sitting here,” Mingyu mumbled. “Sir,” he added on belatedly, unsure of his footing. Footing. His feet were sinking into the floor, he could feel it.

“Then you can help me improve my understanding of our crew,” Jihoon pushed the waning bottle delicately out of Mingyu’s reach. He would have to lunge across his commanding officer to get it back, unless he stood and walked around him, and standing was very much not on the menu. He considered how solid Jihoon would feel, with his sturdy chest and broad shoulders.

“Lieutenant.” The address drew Mingyu’s eyes back up to his face, and Jihoon sipped his whiskey. “Where do you come from? That place, describe it for me to the best of your ability.”

And then he asked Mingyu what he thought of the people there. He paused, almost imperceptibly, when Mingyu said his parents were engineers. He didn’t pry into the verb tense. Instead he asked what he thought of Starfleet. If he could share his more emotionally intuitive impressions of the newly assembled crew and their cohesion. Again, to the best of his ability.

He talked him sober until Chwe and Boo came looking for him in the first hours of morning.

Mingyu almost asked that night about the mind meld, that famous art of Vulcan, almost said — I’d like to be your friend. Can we skip to the part where you know me, and I know you, and there are no secrets. I want to feel like I’ve known you all my life.

But the last time he got blind drunk he asked Minghao to come with him on the _Vela_ , no matter what they were to each other now, and Hao had said _I asked Jun to marry me._

  
  
  


_Stardate 2258.344_

Maybe the moment, what Captain Son would call the precipice of inaction, was after the insurrection on Tarsus IV. When Jihoon was holding the blood inside Mingyu's body by force of pressure to his jugular, and Mingyu was dizzy past pain, his limbs heavy, lips numb. He had some reckless notion then of saying, in case he never got the chance again, that it was humbling to be Jihoon's friend. To be worthy of all that regard. That he thought there would be time to lay down all his truth at Jihoon's feet and make the sort of deliberate, meaningful, carefully examined gesture that the Vulcan would admire. Here are the reasons I love you, Mingyu would say. I've numbered and categorized them and I think you'll agree that my logic is sound.

But he doesn’t. He doesn’t.

  
  
  


_Stardate 2256.31_

“Commander,” he straightens his shoulders. Heat rises in his face.

The quarters beyond the open doorway are darker than he expects, low reddish lights illuminating Jihoon’s tidily made bed, his desk and console, statues of volcanic rock and a triptych of hanging tapestries. He’s never seen Vulcan art. He wishes he were in a position to learn more.

“Lieutenant.” Jihoon has perfect posture, even at his leisure. Can Vulcans read minds without touching you? Mingyu doesn’t think so, but he ought to stop dwelling on the parabolic equation of Jihoon’s pale neck curving into his shoulder, just to be safe. “I was not expecting you.”

“Can I come in, sir?” 

Jihoon graciously steps aside. 

“We haven’t served together long,” he begins before the door has time to shut behind him. “I wouldn’t want you to think, sir, that I’m a negligent officer. I’m sorry you had to see me like that. It won’t happen again.”

Jihoon considers. Mingyu bites his own cheek not to fill the silence. “May I ask you to make an adjustment?”

“Of course, sir.” He brushed his hair for this. He can only hope he looks respectable. He can’t stop thinking of the warm black shine of Jihoon’s eyes at the club, whether he imagined that easy camaraderie. The room was tilting, after all, and his feet were melting into the floor.

It’s very warm in here. Vulcan is a desert planet, he thinks he remembers that much. He’s trying not to say, you asked me so many questions but you didn’t tell me about yourself.

“There is no need to address me formally outside our respective duties.” That minute twitch, the change in the line of Jihoon’s shoulders. He thinks that adds up to a smile. He dares hope. “My name will suffice. If you do not object, Mingyu.”

He shouldn’t fuck his superior officer. He wants to lick the sound of his own name out of his mouth.

“If you’re sure you don’t mind. Jihoon,” he tacks on uncertainly. “I just. I want you to know I’m better. Than how you saw me, the other night.”

“It is not so easy to leave home behind, no matter the opportunity presented,” Jihoon says simply. What is unspoken feels vast. “I would not think less of you for this. Please, continue to perform admirably. As you have.”

He doesn’t cry. He can’t imagine why it feels like he might. “Thank you,” he swallows. Swallows again, and Jihoon waits for him. “I will.”

  
  
  


This is what he would have to say in the official version of his life. The crew of the _Vela_ were young and brave and kind, four hundred and thirty of them crammed onto the smallest ship in its class. Mingyu would say, they made me a better officer and a better man.

Hansol Vernon Chwe (cheated at cards, looked beautiful after he came, all heavy soft eyes and smile hanging off-kilter) saved their lives more than once, straining every capacity of a hunk of metal hanging in cold nothingness. And he was never proud, easily flustered by praise, he talked like it was simple. Boo Seungkwan could detect subtle variations in dialects so obscure the Federation had no names for them, he could make even a Klingon laugh. (A golden cloudlike parasite once used him as a host, undetected. After, after they lured it out and destroyed it with electricity, before it could feed from any more of the crew, Boo hung his head between his knees and sobbed and said it was so _lonely,_ it was the last of its kind. And Seungcheol didn’t berate him, he held him like they were brothers).

Lee Chan enrolled in Starfleet Academy at an unprecedented fifteen years of age, but Mingyu would say admirals should be so lucky as to show his steely nerves under pressure, swearing in three languages with steady hands at his console. (He has a scar disappearing into his hairline but he never talks about how he got it so young, that or the patchy skin at his nape where a tattoo was removed. He’s still afraid of the dark.) Nurse Kwon Soonyoung (can’t hold his liquor, single handedly caused a Tribble infestation) once famously subdued an enraged Gorn with only a mirror, his tricorder, and a harmonica played very poorly.

Captain Choi Seungcheol is brave (so brave he leaves their physician pinched and pale with worry) and to a fault he will try to place himself in the line of fire before his subordinates. When they lost six of their crew on Tarsus IV, he spent hours recording messages for their families. He encouraged any friends of those lost to send their own recollections to the bereaved, if and when they were ready. To let them know the ones they loved were remembered well. His conduct, as Commander Jihoon would say, was always admirable. (No one would be comforted to hear that Ensign Rhee suffocated under rubble while Jihoon held Mingyu’s life in his hands and they couldn’t see her, they couldn’t hear her, dying not fifteen feet away. He thinks of her every time the stillness of his quarters closes around him and so he doesn’t sleep alone.)

The _Vela’s_ chief medical officer, Jeon Wonwoo (meaner than a Taurentian winged lizard when he was mad) could be making a fortune back on Earth but he takes his lean wages and more often than not he sleeps in the nearest clean berth in med bay instead of his quarters. (Or he sits in the rec room with his chin propped in his hand, ice melting in his synthetic whiskey, listening to Boo sing and watching the tension slowly bleed from Seungcheol’s shoulders. He watches, like a poet composing his ode. Some childish part of Mingyu wants to say, I have a book for you to read. There are things you should say to him now.)

Jihoon is brilliant. Jihoon is patient. (Jihoon gets cranky travelling at warp 7 or above because it gives him tinnitus. Jihoon is stubborn and plasters over his stubbornness with compelling arguments for why he’s going to do exactly what he deems fit anyway. Jihoon is so beautiful he sears the eyes, and he would tell Mingyu this is subjective, if he knew his thoughts. Mingyu would say I can’t be objective when it comes to you, and I’ve tried. I know the diameter of your shoulders because they stretch your goddamn uniform and I know how long you smile when you’re really happy, because I know how to look. Just two seconds. One, two.) 

  
  
  


_Stardate 2258.228_

Some time ago, Jihoon added Mingyu’s biometrics to the scanner at his quarters. It was only practical, he said, since Mingyu was going to turn up whenever he pleased regardless. His palm is aching and he can’t bring himself to raise it only to find he’s been denied entry.

Jihoon’s door opens before Mingyu has resolved himself to thumb the buzzer. A shift in momentum halts Jihoon midstride, hesitating with all that ember red light behind him. Mingyu hasn’t been here in seven days. It feels longer.

“Lieutenant,” he says crisply. Mingyu’s stomach turns over. “Can I help you?” He steps into the bright corridor, herding Mingyu back and prompting the door to sigh shut behind him.

The bruise Vernon bit into his collar throbs beneath his uniform in time with his pulse. He wishes, not for the first time, that he was better at staying awake afterward, for the best part. When everything seems warm and uncomplicated.

“Do you have time for breakfast?” he asks, bright as he can muster. “I’m headed that way now.” He hitches his thumb in the direction of their one and only mess hall as if Jihoon might require clarification. The corridor is quiet. Jihoon rises early, always. 

Jihoon is very still. “Not today.” 

“I just thought, if you had time— you were going to tell me about that article you were reading, the one with the Cardassian symbiotes?” 

“If you want to read it then I will send it to you. Is that all?”

He finds he’s bitten his lip. Blood hits his teeth. “Can I talk to you? It doesn’t have to be now, but. Later? Whenever you want.”

The line of Jihoon’s jaw is a knife against the air. A week ago he called Mingyu by his name and said, _when our mission ends, and we revisit Earth, I want you to show me Busan. It would be unrealistic of me to take your recollections at face value. I will have to see it for myself, so I can observe where you have exaggerated._

Now Jihoon says, “That will not be necessary.” His shoulders are drawing up tight, brief discomfort maybe in the adjustment from his blood warm cabin.

“Are you cold?” Mingyu asks, unthinking, and his tongue tries to crawl back down his throat.

As if slapped, Jihoon’s face blanks. For a moment the whites of his eyes seem vast, animal. His chin tucks down when he strides past Mingyu and out of sight.

On the bridge he is unfailingly courteous. He says _thank you, Lieutenant_ and he says _I concur with Lt. Kim’s deduction_ and he consults Mingyu on their flight plan and all the while Jihoon looks through him like a stranger.

  
  
  


_Stardate 2259.56_

There are no fatalities in the disturbance. This is what they’re calling it, because the captain can’t say _giant space amoeba that tried to eat our ship_ with a straight face. The crisis now brought to heel, Seungcheol keeps on prowling between biobeds as the injured crew receive their treatment, tattered golden shirt pressed against the seeping wound in his side, until one of the nurses snaps she’s under the doctor’s orders to sedate him if he won’t be still. There's an upheaval of hierarchy in med bay, where Wonwoo can command the room with a sharp word or a quelling look.

Chased off, Seungcheol perches at Mingyu’s bed instead, watching in queasy fascination as the synthetic skin graft at his shoulder slowly knits into place, sharp and stinging. It’s not the first time Mingyu has been badly burned. He’s made something of a habit of it. He could do without, given an unwelcome allergy to most of the anesthetics in Wonwoo’s arsenal, but in between there are moments that blaze bright with meaning only pain can give. 

Wonwoo has never been one for gentle hands, not with him. Except here, where the exam lights cast diffuse haloes over his shoulders and Wonwoo is a different person entirely. His hand curled absently over the side of Mingyu’s neck as he checks the graft is better than a kiss. (Not that Wonwoo will kiss him, anymore. Not since he last woke up in med bay, freshly transfused with two liters of blood. He woke up asking for Jihoon, and Wonwoo was there pushing him back into his bed. He’d just instructed Jihoon to leave and get some rest, he said. And then slower, searching Mingyu’s face as if he had discovered something new and unexpected there, _he’ll want to know that you’re alright._ )

When he’s drowsing, propped up to avoid moving his left side, he thinks Jihoon hovers at the edge of his vision. He thinks he maybe says something like _you have proven yourself to be nothing if not resilient, Lieutenant_ but it’s not funny like before. Not since Mingyu nearly bled out, or even before that, when Jihoon stopped smiling.

There are no fatalities in the disturbance. Captain Choi receives treatment and records his log of the events. 

(The log will not say, Wonwoo idled up to Mingyu’s bedside again, haggard with exhaustion.

“How long were you awake before this?” Mingyu asked suspiciously. And Jihoon, with clear disapproval, had answered on his behalf, “the doctor reported to med bay twenty-six hours ago.”

“But who’s counting,” Wonwoo tossed off, hovering his tricorder over Mingyu’s shiny new skin and grunting in satisfaction at whatever he found. Absent and feather light, he rapped his knuckles against Mingyu’s skull, then ruffled his hair. “Hey, whoa, get back here.”

Jihoon paused some three paces removed, only a sliver of his profile visible over one tight shoulder. “As you have sedated the captain, I will monitor the repairs from the bridge.”

And Wonwoo frowned, reached for Jihoon as he tried to leave again. “You have a fever, hold on,” he was saying, and then it happened very quickly. One, two. One, Wonwoo reached out to snag Jihoon’s arm. Two, Wonwoo on the floor, his shoulder flattened in on itself. The awful sound of it dislocating, hanging somewhere in between. 

Mingyu didn’t realize he was bleeding until it ran down his arm, his new healing skin split when he bolted out of his bed to reach them. There was so much noise, suddenly, so much shouting and his pulse hammering in his ears but Jihoon was motionless, staring at Mingyu’s blood until understanding crested behind his eyes like a solar flare. Like he’d been concussed, taking in Mingyu shaking him, Wonwoo swaying unsteadily up onto his knees and drawing in small shocked shallow breaths through his mouth.

One, two, and Jihoon shrugged off Mingyu and the nurses too, cutting through them like water. Unerring, as if captured in a tractor beam, he marched to the dispensary, loaded a hypospray, and dosed himself with a sedative to the neck so potent that his eyes rolled back before he hit the floor. One, two.)

  
  
  


_Stardate 2258.345_

He means to wait up for Jihoon, but even after his transfusion he feels hollow and heavy in his own body all at once. He sleeps; he blinks his vision clear and Jihoon is leaning forward on a stool by the biobed. His hands are laced between his knees, his eyes shut. But he opens them immediately, unerring, before Mingyu can summon up the breath for his name.

The lights have been dimmed for evening, and the beds around him are quiet. And this silence is a tangible thing, regarding each other, heavy as if soaked through with rain. It’s difficult not to touch his neck, where micro-sutures are sealed under a silver dressing. 

“I have been a poor friend to you,” Jihoon says, very quietly, and the words seem to emanate from his chest rather than passing over his tongue. 

Mingyu’s mouth is dry. “That’s not true.” At the rasp of his voice, Jihoon rises, turns up the mouthpiece on a bottle of water from the bed’s tabletop swiveled out of reach, and holds it expectantly to Mingyu’s lower lip until he drinks.

“It is not a matter for debate,” Jihoon concludes as he drinks. “As I feel shame regardless.” Mingyu chokes, and he draws away, one slender unscarred hand poised uncertainly but not touching.

Mingyu coughs and a warning twinges in the side of his neck. He’s only heard Jihoon talk like this once before. Even then he never, he would never, declare _I feel._

“Jihoon,” he presses, because it’s been only _Commander_ these past months. “I need you to know. If you never spoke to me again, you would still be my friend. If I didn’t see you for fifty years, you would still be my friend. I would still be proud to tell people I knew you.”

After a pause, Jihoon places a careful hand on Mingyu’s shoulder, over his shirt. Holds, and lingers there. “As would I.”

  
  
  


_Stardate 2259.57_

By the time Jihoon will tell them what’s wrong, the fever has worsened. 

In all his reading, Mingyu has never heard of what Jihoon calls _pon farr._ And in the years he has known his friend he has never seen him so shaken, hunched forward in a chair like any sudden motion might shatter him. His hands are rigid and flattened at his sides and he won’t meet Wonwoo’s eye. The repair of the dislocated shoulder took minutes, and the two of them have been friends for one decade and half another, but Mingyu doubts this is the math that Jihoon wants to hear just now. 

When he regained consciousness, Jihoon demanded to report to the brig and Seungcheol said _shut up and sit down_ and now the hours have spiraled and Mingyu leans more heavily against the door of Wonwoo’s study, separating the four of them from the rest of the universe.

 _What is it?_ And Jihoon says, a biological imperative. A relic of a more savage time, before the philosophy of Surak enlightened Vulcan. It is not, he says, to be shared with outsiders. They should not even know that it exists. 

_Will it pass?_ Not untreated. Jihoon’s lips barely move. Unthinking, Mingyu cups his elbow in consolation, the office hushed and furtive around them. When Jihoon recoils, he mumbles an apology and grasps his own wrists tightly behind his back so as not to forget himself again. He thinks Jihoon has bitten down, hard, on his cheek or his tongue. There’s red on his teeth when he answers them. 

“You’re going to have to tell us what you need,” Seungcheol says tersely. “Consider yourself relieved of duty until you’re not a threat to your own crew.” He doesn’t say _or to your friends,_ but of course Seungcheol knows Jihoon better than most anyone. A rational motivation can be put to words, but what is more visceral has to remain unnamed. This is a kindness.

(After Tarsus IV, Mingyu thanked Jihoon for saving his life. His friend had gone quiet and finally said, your gratitude is unnecessary. Please continue to serve admirably.) 

Wonwoo tells him _we can’t help you until you let us_ and Jihoon says he has to go home. The error was his own, to think he could overcome the symptoms through force of will. 

  
  
  


_Stardate 2259.58_

Of course the _Vela_ charts a course for Vulcan. Mingyu, he charts the course. He studies the coordinates for Jihoon’s home world, its atmosphere and gravity, and it is made real beneath his fingertips. 

They are all, he thinks, each experts in their public and private accounting. Vernon announces when the ship is ready for warp, stabilized from the disturbance, and he never questions their rush. The captain arranges for the crew to take their shore leave in the capital city of Vulcana Regar, nothing out of the ordinary, and even with the witnesses from med bay to spread the word there’s no comment on the commander’s absence from the bridge.

Jihoon meditates in his cabin under self-imposed isolation. But when Mingyu holds his breath and extends his hand over the biometric scanner, he is admitted, and from the dim Jihoon stares back at him like a leopard in a cage. He’s frozen in a pushup not two fingers width from the floor, his entire body hovering in a ruthless straight line. 

“Chan is at the helm,” he says by way of greeting, because he can see Jihoon wrestling impassively with the fact that he is not presently Mingyu’s commanding officer and likely feels unfit to ask. If Jihoon were keeping the record of events, he thinks, he would never use words like shame or grief, and if questioned he would claim they were irrelevant. He could be caught in a lie, after all, because Mingyu knows better. He’s heard it from Jihoon himself.

Jihoon would try to say shame is irrelevant, but he isn’t wearing his uniform. No rank, no Starfleet insignia. His feet are bare in the heat of his cabin, some twenty degrees warmer than the rest of the ship. His arms are uncovered, even, and his black undershirt clings in fever sweat. As he composes himself, pushing up to his feet, Mingyu can see every muscle shift in tense, wary definition. 

“You should not be here.” His tone is scrubbed of inflection but the tendons in his neck leap like wire.

“But here I am,” Mingyu shrugs. “I just have a few more questions. And I thought you could use the company.” Nervous sweat prickles beneath his uniform.

He trusts his instincts, the _knowing_ he has sometimes, in a duel, steering the _Vela,_ reading inflections from Jihoon without evidence for his eyes or ears. Jihoon would not-roll his eyes and suggest that his supposed intuition was the sum of many infinitesimal primate observations honed over millions of years. Mingyu doesn’t care which of them is right. (But Captain Son would say there is not always time, in crisis, to dissect that gut feeling that will save lives.)

Jihoon’s eyes lower. “The former will not improve the quality of the latter. Ask me when I am in control of my faculties again.”

“You didn’t mean to hurt him. He knows that, we all know.”

“That did not prevent it from happening.”

“No, but that’s not really the point of apologies,” Mingyu snaps, frustrated. “Not that you have. Apologized to him, as far as I know.”

“This conversation can wait, whatever your aim.” Jihoon has shown him his back. His slender hands turn over an obsidian figurine at his altar, then trace a jade puzzle box. He’s fidgeting.

“It can’t. I’m asking you now.” Just visible beyond his shoulder, the whitened flare of Jihoon’s nostril is his only answer. “See, I just can’t stop thinking how weird it is. If your logic is what makes you Vulcan, and this thing, this fever can break all that down, but there’s no record of it existing? Well then that seems like a secret kept on purpose. No outsiders, right? Why is that, too embarrassing? Sounds like an awfully emotional response to me.”

“Rather like the one you are attempting to elicit.” Not without success. Agitated, Jihoon leaves a bronze statuette overturned on its side. He veers wide of Mingyu and begins taking inventory of a case already packed on the bed. He shakes out a pair of unremarkable black trousers, inspects them, and rolls them again more tightly before returning them to their place.

“I just think it’s funny how humans and Vulcans can be so much alike.” His grin feels ghastly and unnatural, but Jihoon isn’t looking anyway.

“The physiological similarities greatly outnumber any differences. Your amusement would be strangely placed. Have I humored your need for dramatic timing? Say what you intend to say.”

“If the biological imperative you mentioned is sexual,” he attempts, but Jihoon goes so still that his nerve fails him. If he’s breathing, Mingyu can’t tell. “That’s nothing to be ashamed of. Wonwoo is still your doctor, he ought to know what to expect.” He tries to say, I wish you had told me. I thought you could trust me again. I wish you hadn’t tried to take this on alone.

“As my physician, he has been informed.”

He almost falters again. “I think if you wanted to go back to Vulcan, you wouldn’t have tried to hide this.”

“I have already expressed that I did not believe I was afflicted until I injured Doctor Jeon. Despite the earlier symptoms now clear in retrospect, the onset of _pon farr_ was not anticipated for three to five years. Have I satiated your curiosity? The captain tells me you plan on accompanying us. Taking three officers as well as the head physician from the _Vela_ is irresponsible, as I have told him.”

His tongue crowds the roof of his mouth, but not enough to stop him. “What about me?” 

Slowly, Jihoon’s shoulders creep up tight and close. “You may go, Lieutenant.”

“If I can help you—”

“Leave under your own power or I will remove you.”

Too rushed, his skin hot and tight and mortified, guilty desire hammering beneath his ribs. “Use me. _Please._ I’m strong, for a human,” he tries to dismiss. He tightens his hands into fists to quell their shaking. “It’s rational, isn’t it? Exhaust the mating impulse and this will all be over. You just want it to be over, I can see that, so let me help you. Don’t go back there if it makes you this unhappy.”

He’s ended on the wrong note, because Jihoon would never use his happiness as an excuse for anything. Mingyu leans over the narrow bed as if to hold him fast in his orbit and Jihoon recoils, his hands unclenching from the uniform he was packing in sharp, vicious creases. He’s never seen Jihoon run away from anything, but he pants now and stares beyond Mingyu’s shoulder like he can’t stand the sight of his face.

“A more profound bond is required,” Jihoon bites off. His chest rises and falls and he’s as beautiful as Mingyu has ever seen him, eyes bright in the haze of his fever, silver hair spilling over his brow, those flushed and pointed ears Mingyu has never dared touch, not for lack of longing. “It is not an anatomical exercise. The mind meld is required, and the one bonded to me is awaiting my arrival. Please leave.”

He leaves.

Wonwoo finds him, after. He hovers uncomfortably at Mingyu’s door as if he were the patient about to receive a difficult diagnosis. It’s always amazed him, how going to bed with a person can make you feel more like strangers, later. Like you slipped in when it was dark, a burglar, but suddenly every light flares on and you’re stranded in the heart of someone else’s house where you don’t belong.

Wonwoo asks, “Is there anything I can do to make you stay behind?”

“You could order me, but you won’t.” Mingyu draws his knee up to his chest at the end of the bed. “Why? You were fine with it earlier.” He digs his nails into his palm but the sting is no relief. “I don’t think anyone’s making us _watch_ it, do you?”

“The rite we’ll be observing.” He pauses, like he’d have an easier time with his tricoder, peeling Mingyu back to heart rate and respiration and brainwaves. “It’s a wedding. It was like pulling teeth but he finally told me.” He exhales. “You don’t have to come. I don’t think you should.”

Shock has a numbing quality. The moment before you freeze, lost to the void, must be much the same. Distantly, Mingyu feels as though something unseen has finally aligned.

“Of course I’m coming,” he says, and grins as his stomach drags like an anchor. “My friend is getting married.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> <3
> 
> gorgeous, gorgeous art by lacquer [here](https://twitter.com/lavenderim/status/1225711496493072385?s=20)
> 
> [some vital signage](https://twitter.com/hyb_jabbers/status/1224436729437773825?s=20)
> 
> > [a brief playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2980hEk6WfQTmp317SKeov?si=WbOqWcvoSGenuytV-qSc5w)  
> > [twitter](https://twitter.com/hyb_jabbers)  
> > [curiouscat](https://curiouscat.me/taeminsgucci)


	2. Chapter 2

_Stardate 2257.132_

“How did you know?” Jihoon asks with the sort of detachment that conveys rapt, ravenous interest. “The captain said you were insistent.”

Mingyu digests this, pleased. “Know what, that it wasn’t really you?” A shapeshifter would have been one for the books, sample cells for Wonwoo to croon over at his microscope, but the unfamiliar species was gifted with a shade of proximal telepathy instead, enough to bypass their eyes and convince their brains that they saw a familiar face coming back up from the canyon. “Call it a hunch.”

“I will do no such thing. Explain yourself.”

“It sounds stupid out loud,” Mingyu relents. The adrenaline is still fizzing through him, as if he could float away. He tries not to grin like an idiot. “You don’t put your hands in your pockets. I used to wonder if you sewed them shut. And you don’t,” he demonstrates, shifting his weight, “you don’t cock your hip out at rest. You brace both feet and stand up straight. You’re a creature of habit, Commander.”

“Mingyu.”

“It was just a guess,” he mumbles, the grin winning out. “So I switched my phaser to my right hand. For an hour, on an unfamiliar planet? You would have noticed. You would’ve said something. You wouldn’t have been able to help yourself.”

“You made a series of observations based on known patterns of behavior. You were confident in your findings.” Still Jihoon sounds expectant. Waiting for something.

“People pay attention to their friends. The captain would’ve noticed, too, if he’d been in our landing party.” He finds himself touching his mouth, fingertips grazing, like he can press all the things he shouldn’t say back between his teeth. “Is that okay? Calling you my friend. Human evolution depended on, um, cooperation. We’re very social. It’s rational, isn’t it? To establish connections with people whose strengths complement our own weak points.”

For an eon, or maybe eight seconds, Jihoon doesn’t blink. “Logical.” He squints out across the pink horizon, the light catching his eyes like gleaming silver pins. “Flawlessly logical.” 

  
  


_Stardate 2259.59_

The crew are beaming down for their leave in orderly landing parties while the beta shift maintain the _Vela_ in orbit and await their turn. He’s seen pictures now of the city awaiting them, glittering spires shimmering in the heat, but that is not their destination.

The four of them hide out in Wonwoo’s study again like criminals, desperados under the eaves. Jihoon crams himself into a seat in the corner, as far from Mingyu as possible, and suffers Wonwoo to continue monitoring his vitals. _How would you rate your pain,_ Wonwoo asks, and Jihoon snarls _my blood is on fire._

“There is a ritual component, as the biological imperative precedes our improvement under Surak’s philosophy.” Jihoon is tense, jaw rigid as he forces each word in a flimsy imitation of his usual composure. “Your attendance is not required.”

“We wouldn’t miss your wedding,” Mingyu says. Just now, he means it. There’s already one ceremony he’d attend if he could turn back time, tell himself to shove his bitterness and his regrets and be a better friend. He won’t make it two. He turns the ring on his finger and thinks, I should call. To tell him that everything happened exactly the way it should have. 

Jihoon says nothing, after that.

Later, when the throngs clear, the transporter beams them down to the coordinates Jihoon has provided. Their atoms reassemble in a haze of light, and Mingyu’s shock finally, like a dam crumbling, gives way to reality. 

Vulcan is red desert meeting a pale scorched sky as far as his eyes can see. The higher gravity pulls at the soles of his boots, at his fingertips, and despite Wonwoo’s preparations against the thinner atmosphere he feels lightheaded. He tries, as he counts his breaths, to document what he sees with objectivity. Jagged formations of rock, thin wisps of low hanging cloud, the looming shape of Vulcan’s sister planet along the horizon.

The temple is visible, yet so far that Mingyu can’t make out the features of the people outside. A sheer wall like sandstone dwarfs them and their shadows, rising up more storeys than Mingyu can count, diverted by the chiseled reliefs, giants with their faces and palms upturned to the sun. He wonders if Jihoon miscalculated, or if he intended this, a long slow walk to their final destination. Time to steel himself for what can’t be avoided.

  
  
  


The figures at the entrance don’t wait for them, turning inward, and as they draw closer Mingyu sees why. What he took for the temple itself is a monumental gate, deep enough for windows cut in stone and presumably a warren of rooms inside, but shallow enough that they pass under the shade of the wooden doors and out again between heartbeats.

“Are your parents here?” Seungcheol asks, interested. One of Jihoon’s mothers is the Vulcan ambassador, the other a physicist who famously turned down a seat on the Federation Council, and their captain is very much in the habit of admiring academics.

Jihoon’s eyes are anchored on the temple ahead, its towering monuments with equally impassive Vulcan features. He does not waver, now. “Why should they be?”

The temple is quiet, the shaded halls illuminated by rays from distant skylights in the ceiling so far above them. In puddles of sunlight tame _sehlats_ seem to drowse but crack their yellow eyes to watch, the animals caught between wolf and bear with six inch tusks and leonine tails lashing the floor curiously.

Unerring, Jihoon draws them to the next echoing chamber, a long reflecting pool running the length of the room to a shallow stone dais, the sort of blood and jewel bright tapestries Mingyu recognizes hung along the walls. There is little fanfare. Had he not been told, Mingyu thinks he wouldn’t guess even now that two people were about to join together for the rest of their lives. 

Jihoon is wearing his uniform again. Mingyu tries not to stare at the blue against his skin. This is how he will always remember him, he thinks, no matter if he tries to forget. Spine straight, containing the chills from his fever, all silver and blue against warm desert shadows. Once, many centuries ago, a ship might have worn a face just like this at its prow. Untouchably beautiful and resolute, with wind-scoured dignity. 

A Vulcan elder sits in the single high chair, her eyes like flint as one figure detaches from the cluster and Jihoon and his betrothed greet each other in taut civility, without an embrace or clasping of hands. 

His name is Jeonghan. His bones are very finely made, his long black hair not gone early to gray like Jihoon’s and held back in a sleek profusion of interwoven braids, set with combs like jade. And unlike Jihoon again, he appears quite at his ease. The companion who waits behind him fidgets, insomuch as a Vulcan can fidget, but Mingyu doesn’t catch his name. Only the shifting of his weight from one foot to another, minute, but enough to stir the hem of his pale surcoat.

Words are read that Mingyu’s translator can’t parse, an ancient form of the Vulcan language. All except _pon farr,_ which comes through with awful clarity. He doesn’t understand, and he can’t see Jihoon’s face, only the back of his head, so he watches the man Jihoon will marry. His eyes are heavy lidded now, tranquil, as if lost in his own thoughts.

And when the priestess closes her book and grants them leave to present their own remarks before the union, Jeonghan squares his shoulders and simply says, _no._

  
  
  


The next phrase in High Vulcan that Mingyu learns is _kal-if-fee_. A fight of passion.

“There is no place for outworlders to witness this,” the priestess says. How cold she sounds, neither disapproving nor curious, and how warm the Vulcan he knows best seems in comparison.

“They are my friends,” Jihoon says. He does not look at Jeonghan again. He conveys no surprise, no dismay. “To bear witness is their right. It is unprecedented but not improper.”

“They may not interfere,” she instructs.

“Their conduct is beyond reproach.” 

She regards Jeonghan, his face mild as spring dawn. “Do you object to this allowance?”

“I do not object.” His voice is soft, musical. He regards them each in turn, takes in Mingyu’s disgust and Wonwoo’s wariness and Seungcheol’s jaw still hanging slack with outrage. “I am certain J’hoon would not name them lightly. I take their honor to be as his own.”

The priestess names an hour of morning relative to the sun, which seems comprehensible to every untroubled Vulcan listening, and in two curt words Jihoon is gone.

  
  
  


They all try to follow him, of course. But as the temple acolytes that bar their way explain, unmoved, they are not Vulcan and so cannot enter the inner chambers. And even if they were, one adds, disapproving, a Vulcan would know better than to intrude on another’s meditation. 

There is no one, however, who stops him from exploring the outer alcoves and antechambers as Seungcheol and Wonwoo stage a furious whispered debate over whether or not they can stand idly by as their hormonally incapacitated friend accepts a duel. (They could beam him back aboard the _Vela,_ and then what. Then what.) Mingyu is familiar with traditional Vulcan weaponry, has made a point to be, and in this Jihoon would indulge him, doubtless chalking it up to the same romanticism that led Mingyu to study the rapier. The _lirpa,_ he knows, is a long staff bearing a fan-shaped axe at one end and a bludgeoning club at the other. It is a weapon intended to make the most of Vulcan strength

He tries to imagine Jeonghan’s slender companion, the one he named as J’soo, utilizing such a brutal weapon. Then he tries to imagine where he would go if he had just broken off an engagement and made an awfully un-Vulcan spectacle of himself.  
  


J’Soo is meditating in the dusk when Mingyu’s search finally carries him to the far side of the temple complex. Or maybe any Vulcan repose looks like meditation. He cracks an eye when Mingyu’s shadow falls over him.

If there’s an etiquette for this, no one ever taught him. “I need to speak to Jeonghan.” 

Delicate brows lift. “He will speak to you if he chooses. Do you think he needs my permission?”

“Didn’t want to be rude,” he grumbles. So this is how it’s going to be. J’soo won’t stand and looming over him is making Mingyu feel like a goon.

“I have never met one of your species,” J’soo observes, closing his eyes in dismissal. “You are not as I expected.”

Jeonghan, when Mingyu finds him deep in the garden, is less serene. The scarce lights cast dappled shadow over his face, the slow drip of the irrigators loud in the hush as they regard each other. He looks pinched and tired and not so regal as the man who announced that Jihoon would have to fight for his hand.

“Have you come to make a speech? I cannot confess any interest in hearing you lecture me on traditions not your own.” Jeonghan has turned away from him, solemn in profile as he studies the grip of a tenacious vine on his fingertip. He dips his chin to blow gently on the tendril and it releases him.

(Captain Son would say, there is no species without fear. Fear of death, fear of grief, and fear of the unknown. Fear that we will cease to exist. Fear that we will not be remembered. Fear that we did not matter.)

“Hear me out and I’ll leave. It’s not like you have anywhere else to be.”

“Then make your point.”

“Jihoon is a good man. But you’ll tell me that’s subjective, so I’ll try to see it your way.” He swallows heavily. Even the shade is so warm it conspires with gravity to lay like some tangible thing over his skin, suffocating. Jeonghan tilts his head and waits, as good as an admission of curiosity. “Jihoon is the first Vulcan officer in Starfleet. There are others, now, but he’ll always be the first. His rank is prestigious. His reputation is sterling. He’s brilliant, and capable of making an entire crew of irrational humanoids see his logic.” Idiot, aching fondness pricks his eyes. “He’s strong, adaptable, resourceful, loyal.” It comes out sour, but he doesn’t intend it as a jab. “By every objective measure, he is the sort of man you’d want as a husband, a partner, a friend. I’m asking you to reconsider.”

Jeonghan betrays himself only by blinking rapidly during what does turn out to be a speech, after all. “I am aware of his commendable qualities. Our acquaintance far precedes yours.” 

The ferns and hanging vines seem to shiver at attention. Mingyu’s stomach is falling out, a black hole has opened up where it ought to be, but he can survive this.

“He’d be easy to love. You’ll regret it if you let him go like this.”

Jeonghan could hardly look less impressed if Mingyu had spat on his shoe. “I should have expected such impulse and sentiment from you.”

“Do you hate him?”

His eyes narrow. “Of course not.”

“Then see this through. He’s a good man,” he can’t help but repeat himself. He wishes he knew an equation for this. How to quantify grace. “He knows how to forgive. And you got yourself into this, both of you.” 

If Jihoon’s calm is sturdy, warm as a banked fire, Jeonghan’s serenity is an icy lake, with lethal shadows shifting beneath the surface. “Is that the contract to which I consented? J’hoon is not here. He left. He will leave again. In the bond I am met with silence.”

As Vernon readied the transporter on the _Vela_ , Jihoon had said _I will be fit to return to duty in three to six days._ Seungcheol asked, surprised, how long it had been since they saw each other last, him and his betrothed. And Jihoon, with uncommon impatience, said he could not recall. 

Do you feel loneliness, Mingyu doesn’t ask now, because he isn’t as cruel as he’d like to be. He thinks of Minghao, and his incomprehension as he stared back at Mingyu and his offer. _I just promised Jun a life here,_ he said. _How could I leave him for five years?_

“Jihoon left for Starfleet, and you love someone else,” he says instead, tired and hopeless, and Jeonghan makes a short insulted noise through his nostrils. As if, of all things, Mingyu were committing a transgression by acknowledging his emotional attachment. 

“I have studied all potential outcomes and arrived at the most logical conclusion.”

Something awful aligns at last in the map of his understanding. Mingyu thinks of the man outside with his guileless housecat eyes, pictures him again struggling with a double ended weapon nearly as tall as Mingyu. Vulcans are strong, but Mingyu is used to sizing up his opponents, and he doesn’t see the violence in him. “You’re not going to let him fight Jihoon. You were very careful, weren’t you? You didn’t name him.”

Finally Jeonghan stops pretending to study the glyphs carved up one pillar. “J’hoon has accepted the challenge regardless. It is no longer his to refuse.”

“Can you name anyone you choose?” Jeonghan is silent. “Of course you can. Why put him through this? Why not ask Jihoon to break off the engagement? He would help you.”

“And risk madness, death and dishonor? A fight might yet save his life. There are historical records that prove as much. If not, perhaps a shock. I am not unmoved by the fever, but I have a partner. J’hoon does not. There is no benefit to me if he suffers unduly. Your captain is strongly built, is he not? He may well survive.”

“And he might not. That works just as well for you, doesn’t it?” Mingyu’s lip peels back from his teeth. “A shock. Yeah, I think killing one of his closest friends would do the trick. God, why couldn’t you have told him?”

“ _Pon farr_ does not descend at what you would consider puberty, or the age of majority.” Jeonghan’s tone is level. His eyes are so thin he could turn them on Mingyu like the edge of a knife. “We are young for this. I do not know why the mating cycle has advanced. By my projections I had three to five years yet to make arrangements. I collected exhaustive medical histories from our families and their own experiences. I was not expecting the fever. I was not expecting his call. And you overestimate how long I will tolerate your judgements on matters beyond your comprehension.”

“My captain could die tomorrow and my friend will have to live with himself. They’re like brothers, do you know that? Do you care?”

“Humans are frail.” Jeonghan blinks like a lizard. If he didn’t know Jihoon, he’d think him cold. But he looks miserable in the fading light, and some part of Mingyu is so very tired of begrudging people who they love. 

“Choose me,” Mingyu says. “Just tell me how to get him through this.”

He could more easily calculate the distance between stars than whatever passes behind Jeonghan’s steady eyes. “By your own estimation you could die.”

 _I owe him a life,_ Mingyu thinks. And he says, “so tell me how to win.”

  
  
  


_Stardate 2258.224_

Maybe in the grand reckoning of his life he will be asked, _when were you most ashamed?_ And Mingyu would touch his finger to the page and say, _here._

  
  
  


The message from his cousin is long, so he doesn’t get around to watching it for nearly a week. It’s already old, anyway, batched in with the other personal transmissions in their last upload from Starfleet. She’ll want to update him on the baby, and Mingyu wants to hear it, but he has to be in the correct frame of mind. It sinks him into a dramatic mood, otherwise, thinking how her little boy will be running and talking and scraping his knees before Mingyu ever gets to meet him.

So the message waits until a good night, when he’s unwinding with his second drink and an unsatisfied itch of anticipation along his neck. He was hoping to ask Jihoon to play chess, finally adept enough to beat Seokmin or Boo one match out of three. But he can be patient; he’s waited this long. In the sunless hours of morning at the helm he had amused Jihoon with his favorite old pirate stories, the sort of swashbucklers he loved as a kid, rebels and folk heroes. Their trajectory unhurried, Jihoon didn’t scold the digression. He said _I would expect nothing less from you_ in that vast warm ocean way of his, no single mannerism giving him away and yet encompassing, tangible, and it seeped through Mingyu’s skin and lingered there all day.

It’s past sundown in her transmission, the thick of summer back in Busan, a curtain swaying in the breeze from an open window. Hyejin is curled up on her sofa with a knee to her chest, looking at ease, or maybe just loose-jointed with exhaustion. Her hair is slipping from its braid and there’s a stain near the collar of her shirt.

Doyeon isn’t with her. Of course he wouldn’t be, this late at night. Mingyu is unprepared for the pang of hurt behind his sternum all the same.

They were born the same year, he and the closest thing he has to a sister, but he feels a decade behind her now. Her house and her possessions surround her: a lumpy blanket woven in her last craft hobby phase, a floating shelf with misshapen mugs and bowls presumably from her new one, her small elderly dog struggling up to doze on her knee, fresh flowers blooming in glazed pots of cerulean and emerald green. Mingyu has never set foot in this house. It feels more removed just now than any uncharted system.

Hyejin tells him about the questionable baby xenolinguistics foundation program that’s all the rage, and taking Doyeon to the ocean for the first time, the water finally sparkling and safe to enter decades after the _Galantis_ spill when they were little. 

“He keeps staring back at me like a whole real person,” she laughs, amazed. “Isn’t that weird? Watching him figure things out, I can’t get over it. He tried to square up to this seagull like man, I could take you, let’s go.” She talks, she pulls up her woolly socks and fixes her hair and sips her tea and pets her little dog and finally curls her hands up tight at her sides.

“I have to tell you something. It’s about the shed,” she says, and Mingyu grips his cup so hard his forearm spasms.

He barely knows his uncle’s second wife. They met after he enrolled in the academy, when only Hyejin’s gruesome threats could drag him back to Busan once or twice a year. He’d only just found Minghao, a feeling like thinking you were the center of your own universe only to find yourself a satellite, a stunned moon orbiting a world of tantalizing shadows, its atmosphere crackling with electrical storms and revealing glimmers of something green and good and wholesome beneath. It was difficult, back then, to make himself leave. Soojin seemed alright, he thought, if a little particular, never sitting down with company (or maybe just him) but Mingyu wasn’t bothered to know more.

“I’m sorry.” Hyejin catches her lip between her teeth. “Doyeon had an ear infection and I wasn’t getting much sleep and she just. Called the once and started throwing things out when she didn’t get an answer.”

There wasn’t much to leave behind when he joined Starfleet. Just the important things, in the old shed since sealed and weatherproofed, his uncle’s little office before he retired. The posthumous medals; his dad’s overcoat with two hard ginger candies still wrapped in paper, in the left pocket; an external hard drive the size of his palm, full of home movies with tidy organized file names like _Honeymoon, Algiers [2224-06-18]_ and _Mingyu, First Birthday [2228-04-06]_ and _Mingyu, School Play [2235-10-22]._ He always wondered if his mom meant to have another child, thinking ahead to Minhee comma Graduation or Minseok comma Dance Recital. 

“I'm so sorry.” Hyejin repeats. “I didn't know she'd started throwing stuff away, it’s not like— I can show you what I was able to get out but I can't find your mom's journals. We got back some of the clothes she donated, but they already took— the trash was already gone.”

A restless crackle swells in volume. The baby monitor, he realizes, Hyejin’s eyes shifting up to where inset footage from Doyeon’s crib must be. She’s shifting her weight up but lingering like even pausing the recording would be disrespectful. 

Out of sight a door clicks. Hyejin says something soft he can’t catch and Yongsun, padding into view in her pajamas, flaps a hand at her to sit back down. Pausing behind the sofa, she mumbles Mingyu’s name like a question and waves at the screen when Hyejin nods. She’s small and lovely in her pale robe, disappearing to Doyeon’s room. 

Under the nausea he feels a rush of guilt, the first sting of air across an open cut. Why should Hyejin worry about his things, losing sleep over him when she’s got her wife and her baby and her deaf old dog at home. 

He stops the video. 

Over his third drink, and then his fourth, streaking wet down his chin, he waits to see if he’s going to cry. He doesn’t, for all the heat pressing up against his skin from the inside, but the blood drum in his ears gets louder, and louder again. The band of pressure at his temples grows tighter, like he’s being forced through the mouth of a bottle too small for his skull. 

His dad wasn’t one for writing things down, recording himself to a transcription program while he worked. But his mother kept journals, each one bound in cloth she liked, silk in shade tree green, butter gold flecked with tiny white flowers, purples like summer shadows, indigo with pinpricks of silver like a starry sky. 

He hasn’t read them all. Only ever one entry at a time, pored over until he could hear the cadence of her voice musing theories he came to understand later, or poking sly fun at her more self-important peers. They weren’t the words of some hero sanitized by time that he would never meet, or even bickering like love notes in the margins. Once he finished, he thought, she would have nothing more to say to him. Better to take his time. Not to risk bringing them along. 

He’s bitten his fist, he finds. He wants to sink his teeth in and tear out bone.

The bottle doesn’t break, when he throws it. Nothing standard issue is meant to shatter, to reduce the potential for accidents. Thoughtful, just like the soundproofing in their cabins. He can put his head in his hands and scream until there’s no air and black spots dance along the edge of his vision. But when he tries to rip his monitor from the desk something in the frame cracks and splinters away, and the exposed metal slices deep into his palm. 

Ridiculous, the amount of blood spat out by a hand wound. Already fat drips blotting the floor, more streaming down his wrist as he examines the gash numbly. No severed tendons, he thinks as if watching himself from very far away. That’s lucky. He bends each finger and his thumb to confirm, then flexes a fist and somewhere his body spasms at the pain. He ought to raise his hand up higher to slow the bleeding. He ought to walk to med bay and lie to a nurse and hope Wonwoo’s not around to demand an explanation.

There’s so much pressure in his chest, the air he sucks in can’t seem to fill his lungs again. There, now he’s crying. 

The buzzer at his door is pressed and held and his heart leaps up to his throat.

Jihoon is leaning forward anxiously when the door opens, a hand at either side of the frame, hunched and coiled in on himself. He’s out of breath, Jihoon who can outrun every long-legged human on board, but whatever the crisis he didn’t use the biometric scanner to let himself in. There are no warning whistles from the ship, no flashing lights, Jihoon wouldn’t have wasted time running here when he could hail Mingyu from anywhere onboard.

“What happened?” Mingyu snaps, a hook in his gut, but Jihoon is examining his face and then his gaze drops to the shirt wrapped tightly around Mingyu’s left hand. Belatedly, Mingyu tries to crowd his line of sight so he can’t see so much blood. “Jihoon?”

Jihoon blinks rapidly and pulls himself upright with a steadying breath. “Are you well?”

“Fine.” The confusion has the contradictory effect of clearing his head, sharpening him. Fuck but his hand hurts. Wonwoo’s going to make him see Seokmin if he can’t think of a cover, and Mingyu isn’t ready for his friend to be his therapist. “Why are you here?” 

“You are bleeding.” Jihoon steps so close he can see the gleam of sweat along his upper lip, the late stubble darkening his chin. “Why are you bleeding?”

Mingyu tries to say, _it’s nothing, just a dumb accident, are you even surprised,_ but he steps backward with a lump in his throat instead and Jihoon follows like a tightrope walker, allowing the door to seal them off in the quiet. 

“Will you show me?” Jihoon asks when Mingyu keeps on staring at his boots. Somehow he always finds a way to twist words into new configurations, just unexpected enough that they take Mingyu like a hammer to the temple. He doesn’t say _may I see_ and just now Mingyu wants to kiss him for that and shut out the white noise. He wants to imagine this is how Jihoon would sound, with his thumbs on Mingyu’s hips. Not _may I_ but _will you._ As if he could illuminate answers for Mingyu that he never knew were buried. As if he would wait for Mingyu to search himself. 

He nods, not trusting his voice, and Jihoon is on him like a leash snapping. He unwinds the sodden shirt and immediately lifts Mingyu’s palm up nearly to his own chin, uncomfortably close, to slow the bleeding. He could be deciphering Klingon runes for all that Mingyu can read in his expression.

“Will you wait here?” In a concise succession of glances he takes inventory of the blood on the floor, the spilled whiskey, the smashed monitor and the chair thrown from the desk because Mingyu didn’t think to lock it into place before his tantrum. He doesn’t ask, _will you do more harm to yourself if I leave you alone._

“I’ll wait for you,” Mingyu croaks, throat squeezing so tight he can’t breathe. It isn’t what he means to say at all. 

Jihoon studies him for one held breath, and another, then nods, angling Mingyu to hold his wound above his shoulder before he leaves.

Time elongates as if squeezed through a black hole. Mingyu struggles one-handed to right the mattress he threw from his berth and sits at the side with his legs hanging over, staring at the place where his skin parts, from the fleshy delta below his thumb to the thin expanse of his palm, all the rivers of his life and love and fate severed, flowing nowhere, washed in red. He tries to hold fast in his mind’s eye the way his mom’s messy handwriting looked on the page, absent recursive patterns cluttering the margins where she would pause to think.

In his first astronomy class, they learned about the star Betelgeuse. The star was dimming, according to his professor, and eventually they would observe a supernova. But here their math and hubris would fall away at the vastness of the universe, like Icarus, she said. The star could blaze and die tomorrow, or in ten thousand years. Beyond their reckoning. Just like no matter how far sentient life explored the universe, they would never reach the end. They would only ever be pinpricks in the vastness of cosmic time. 

This is how it seems to him when Jihoon appears kneeling at his feet. He doesn’t hear the door. He can only see the amber evening lights glowing in Jihoon’s hair when he dips his head, the way his skin looks lit from within. As if he had flared into existence. Ineffable. Beyond reckoning.

“Your tendons and ligaments are intact,” Jihoon murmurs, setting the borrowed tricorder aside. From the satchel on the floor he produces disinfectant, the mist lighting cold fire on Mingyu’s obediently outstretched palm. When he winces, reflexive, Jihoon clasps his unoccupied hand below Mingyu’s knee in apology. How pathetic he must seem, to earn this sort of coddling. Jihoon is accustomed enough to humans to accept the occasional point of contact, but it’s not like him to reach out.

“You cannot receive anesthetic,” Jihoon confirms now. He knows the answer, he would remember his allergy, but he still waits for Mingyu to nod again before withdrawing the warmth of his hand from his leg. “This will hurt.”

Micro-sutures are remarkable, compared to the more invasive remedies he studied in his history of medicine elective. It’s the collagen bonding agent and its reactive dyes injected into the wound that hurt like a motherfucker, that have his head snapping back and his jaw clenching, not the green laser directed by Jihoon’s steady hands. One on the instrument, one fused like steel around Mingyu’s wrist to hold him in place. 

When Jihoon releases him, he falls back across the bed, blind to the final ministrations, swipes of antiseptic erasing his blood like it never was. A transparent bandage seals to the contours of his palm like wet tissue. His breath feels ragged with more than pain. He’s trying to remember a pattern. His mom had taken an old chima, her great-grandmother’s, ruined with water stains and age, and cut out what she could salvage. Gray silk like the underside of a storm cloud, but he can’t remember the flowers. Forest poppies or white forsythia. It was the last one she bound. He never read it. Somewhere his mother’s last words to herself, for herself, are being ground for compost.

He squeezes his stinging eyes until he sees stars.

When the bed dips beside him, he drags himself up. His body feels clammy but his face is flushed hot and tight again, impossible to hide. He can see where Jihoon has gathered up the fragments of casing, the overturned bottle. The bloodstains across his floor are gone.

“I’m sorry.” His voice is wrecked, no better than before. “You ran here. What’s going on?”

Jihoon laces his fingers together, hanging between his knees. He’s leaning forward, so relaxed it can only be deliberate. “Nothing that cannot wait. I am relieved that I could be of assistance.”

“Thank you.” Captain Son would say, the ship is a covenant. So long as we serve together, your safety is as my own. (There was a stain on the page, as if a pen was held to paper, but there are no words. Mingyu wants to ask that stranger, how do you learn to forgive people for leaving you behind.) “I’m okay now. If you need to be somewhere.”

“Noted.” 

“Did you see Wonwoo?”

“He is not currently on duty.” Jihoon’s laced fingers flex. He’s cleaned up well, none of Mingyu’s blood staining the creases of his knuckles or his cuticles. “Nurse Kwon did not feel compelled to question me.”

“That’s good.” Maybe if he asks nicely, Jihoon will sedate him, and he won’t have to cry in front of the most beautiful man in his universe.

“The somatic symptoms of anger are not easily dismissed,” Jihoon remarks to the air, to himself, conversational. His eyes are heavy, unfocused. “Like a difficult meal, they must be digested. The root of the emotional reaction must be articulated before it may be processed and expunged. Or so I have found,” he adds, softer, “in my own experience.”

“In _your_ experience?”

“That is what I said.”

He thinks, reflexively, idiotically, of a supernova in his chest. It must feel something like this. “My parents designed this ship. Did you know that?”

Jihoon turns his face toward him, finally. He doesn’t blink. “I did not know that.”

Silently, Mingyu counts the lights set into his ceiling. Breathes in, and out, until he can put the words in order. “My dad was on the structural design team. My mom developed the warp core. All the other ships from this generation of the constellation class, they’ve been retired as research vessels. The _Vela_ is the only one still deployed. It was still under construction, though— when I was a kid. They didn’t get to see it.”

A considering silence. “You chose the _Vela_ for this reason?”

His vision is swimming again and he can’t make out if Jihoon’s expression changes. “Tell me it’s irrational. That being here doesn’t bring me any closer to them.”

With calm any painted saint would envy, Jihoon says, “it does not.” Deliberately, every movement telegraphed, he lays one cool hand over Mingyu’s, like a shield curved above what will be unblemished skin tomorrow. “But perhaps it is a comfort to you all the same.”

Slouched over like this, they’re eye to eye. Their faces are so close that Mingyu can see the finest veins over his eyelids, the skin like paper. He thinks, not for the first time, that his parents would find Jihoon remarkable. 

Jihoon is holding Mingyu’s hand between both of his own, thumbs circling and soothing the jut of bone at his wrist, his knuckles, turning his palm minutely under the light to inspect the progress of his cells rejoining and to grant Mingyu privacy with his own thoughts. He’s heard the rumors about Vulcans and hands, nerve endings and sensuality, but Mingyu is the one shivering at every point of contact. Like pins and needles, like static electricity.

Jihoon glances up sharply. “Are you cold?” 

He’s still holding Mingyu’s hand. “No.”

For a moment he thinks Jihoon is going to gently, willfully misunderstand. His eyes are flat black, opaque. Then his lips part a millimeter, the sleek inner flesh shining, and he strokes the backs of his nails up Mingyu’s wrist where the veins press up against his skin. 

“You do this sometimes,” he manages, all dizziness and disbelief. The map of Jihoon’s veins, of his own veins, all tangled together in a single elusive thought. You read my mind, he means. Can you really read my mind.

Jihoon drags his knees onto the bed and Mingyu is forced to lift his chin up to keep watching his eyes. He could sit up straighter and negate the difference. He doesn’t. 

“I have never done this,” Jihoon corrects him, his voice smoke rough like he’s never heard before, and he rests the pad of his middle finger into the soft hollow over Mingyu’s sternum. When he doesn’t move, he sees Jihoon’s eyelashes flicker, a momentary calculation before he trails two fingers higher, where his heart is trying to hammer through his skin, trying to crawl up his throat. “Not this. Not with you.”

If he were plunged into a lightless trench at the bottom of the sea, he couldn’t feel more crushed in his own skin. Jihoon is touching him and it feels so far away, his temples aching from how he’s clenched his teeth, his palm pulsing with hot tender warning spikes of pain. One knuckle traces Mingyu’s jaw up to his earlobe and back to the jut of his chin. He tries to breathe out the squeeze in his lungs and shudders instead.

Reverent, that’s how it must look from the outside, the way Jihoon’s palm grazes the side of his face, fingers dipping past his hairline. He wishes he could feel it. His stomach has gone cold and bottomless but Jihoon is so warm, and he’s right here.

“Will you permit me?” Jihoon is asking, all smoke rough again but hushed, circling the tip of Mingyu’s brow. This is how easily a Vulcan can see your thoughts, if he chooses. Tip open the riot inside Mingyu’s skull until it all spills out.

“Just let me,” he says, jaw so stiff he’s not sure Jihoon can hear him anyway. “Let me,” he repeats, louder, and Jihoon’s shuttered, uncertain blink answers him, hand still upraised. 

He weighs three stone more than Jihoon, and he may be only a fraction as strong but he can use momentum and the imitation of Earth’s gravity when no resistance is offered, when Jihoon only tips his chin up in incomprehension as Mingyu’s weight forces him to sit back on his own legs, to make a place for Mingyu in his lap. One knee braces Mingyu on the bed and one bare foot meets the floor. He has leverage, and he has Jihoon’s tight unyielding body beneath him. The urge to buck up against his warmth is overwhelming. 

Leaning back to get a clearer view of Jihoon’s face upsets his balance, swaying precariously until his stomach tightens up to compensate, but already Jihoon is there. One hand clutching Mingyu’s thigh, the other splayed in the dip of his spine over his sweat damp shirt. He holds him fast as if he could keep him from the edge of the earth.

“You are not well.”

His head is spinning and his tongue can’t find his list of reasons, all the things he needs Jihoon to hear. If Jihoon would backhand him he could see fireworks, stop the buzzing, and his mouth waters at the thought. 

“Do you think about me?” He tries to reach back but a narrow look quells him. He holds his bandaged hand up for proof and tries with his right instead. Jihoon doesn’t fight him, dragging that steadying hand from the small of his back to the curve of his ass. He’s so still, chiseled from granite, but he’s breathing through his thinly parted lips. “Do you?”

“I see you every day.” Jihoon’s voice is thick. “That would be unavoidable.”

“But do you think about kissing me?” Fever warm, dipped in honey, that’s how it feels with Jihoon staring up at him. Warmth only a permeable barrier away, if he could just push his way through. Jihoon is here, and Mingyu’s body is yielding to every press of his fingertips like he belongs there, flesh dimpling, and home is sixteen lightyears away, which is ninety-four trillion miles, which is one hundred and fifty-one trillion kilometers, and his parents are never coming back, and if Mingyu stays away long enough no one on Earth will miss him at all.

“Do you want me to think about you?” Jihoon asks, but what he sees must be answer enough, because he reaches up to thumb the corner of Mingyu’s mouth, eyes heavy and dark, and he slots their mouths together when Mingyu sinks down to meet him. 

He’s firm, and somewhere in the distraction his cupped hand has retreated to the safety of Mingyu’s hip. But he thaws beautifully for the plying soft presses of Mingyu’s mouth, opening up in increments as he licks the flats of his teeth and sinks his good hand into all that pale hair. And he permits the slow drag friction of their bodies as Mingyu finds a place for his hips, every stutter grazing sparks, pressing him up harder against the rub of his clothes and Jihoon’s solidity. It’s gorgeous, until in the space catching his breath he remembers again.

He thinks the noise is him, but it’s Jihoon — minute, shivering vocalizations deep in his throat as Mingyu bites the bolt of his jaw. Over his shoulder he sees the bare and bent metal framing his monitor. 

Better, with his tongue in Jihoon’s mouth. Better still when he reaches his clumsy right hand between their thighs and pulses Jihoon’s hardening cock through his clothes. 

He doesn’t know the word Jihoon bites off. Are there curses, in Vulcan? He grins. 

“Wow, tell me how you really feel,” he dares. He’s so near a blissful edge. Jihoon could break him in half, Jihoon could do anything to him, and then he wouldn’t have to think at all. 

“A touch overheated,” Jihoon snips back with remarkable tartness for the hectic verdant flush he’s wearing. And oh, fuck, but he is strong. He takes Mingyu’s weight and tips him onto his back like it’s nothing. 

He kisses Mingyu, but slowly, ignoring the squeeze of his thighs and his unbandaged hand tugging at his nape. Shallow, in sips, until their breathing calms. He’s tracing Mingyu’s face again, from the dip of his temple to the rise of his cheek and the hinge of his jaw. It’s a constellation lit up in gold, and Mingyu knows what it means. He recoils before he can help himself.

The seeking hand curls in on itself. "Mingyu," he says. "You seem—"

“Can I get some air?”

“I apologize.” Jihoon is already out of reach, mouth still soft with kissing. “If I overstepped, the error was my own. You have experienced pain and distress. I thought I might be able to lessen your ordeal.”

For a moment, Mingyu thinks he’s going to punch him. The pain of his left hand tightening knifes up his arm. 

“I’m fine.”

“You do not have to be.”

Red noise, white noise, and suddenly he can’t stand the sight of Jihoon at all. Can’t stand the patient weight of his regard. He thinks he might keel over the side of the bed and vomit.

“You know what?” he snaps. “This would be fun, but I’m tired.”

They have always disagreed on this. Mingyu and his intuition. The plucked strings of wrongness that shiver his bones before disaster. It feels like this, just like this. The empty ringing feeling like a bell, that sinking dread. He is watching Jihoon vanish like a comet, fading to a pinprick of light.

“Fun,” Jihoon repeats. It sounds hollow in his mouth.

Mingyu can’t remember what else he says, but this he recalls with crisp, sharp edges. The way Jihoon lingered, hinged in on himself as if protecting a wound. One pristine hand clutching the mattress by his side, the back of his hand traced in blue-green veins, and Mingyu knew he should cover it with his own, that he should be brave.

He isn’t brave.

Jihoon leaves.

  
  
  


_Stardate 2259.60_

The communicator he discards after the all-clear keyed in to Seungcheol. His boots follow, bare feet soundless when flexing for purchase in the velvety sand. He won’t need either. No one observes him in the dark, in the deep quiet between moonless midnight and early morning. The air has turned cool, chilling his earlier sweat. His head still rings with all that Jeonghan has taught him.

Even unencumbered, he bruises his knees and skins the point of his chin wriggling in a slit of a window from the outside.

At the center of the austere stone chamber is Jihoon. Without his shirt, sheened in sweat, practicing a complicated maneuver with a _lirpa._ The weapon moves like an extension of his arm, as if it weighs nothing. He leaves off at the sight of Mingyu, checking his momentum, his stare flat and unamused. 

There’s a geometric tattoo at the crest of his shoulder. Small, hard to see from this distance, but Mingyu knows the design. A complicated triangular affair, delicate lines. Wonwoo has one just like it, in the same place. It fit the press of Mingyu’s lips, just so. He feels hideously out of his depth, misaligned, his legs already fatigued covering so much ground at higher gravity.

“You should not be here.”

“You have a religion without gods, who’s going to smite me?” Not a twitch of amusement answers him. Jihoon is breathing heavily again, obvious with the lift of that very dense and supple chest situation that Mingyu is decidedly not staring at, not at all. Now is not the time to get distracted. In the book of his life, the one never written, he has his own marginal asides. I wanted to kiss you here, it would say, here you were a bit smug after that gambit on Andor worked and I wanted to drop to my knees. Here I wanted to lick the rain from your neck and here I wanted to hold your face close to mine, I wanted to hear you breathe in the dark.

Here I hurt you. Here you forgave me.

“Aren’t you going to ask why I came?” he presses, blotting the blood from his chin on one golden cuff. 

“Why you have come to persuade me from what must be done in the morning? No, I do not believe clarification is required. Your concerns are noted. This changes nothing.”

“No, I agree. You’re going to have a fight tomorrow.” His pulse is kicking up so loud in his ears, he wonders if Jihoon can hear him.

A muscle jumps in Jihoon’s cheek. “We have discussed your penchant for dramatic timing, Lieutenant.” 

“You’re right, no sense in waiting for a big reveal, I know how you hate the theater.” He spreads his hands and shrugs. “You’ll fight me.”

Jihoon searches him, uncomprehending. “No. That is not possible.”

“Actually,” Mingyu licks a fingertip and mimes turning through a book like the tome the priestess J’woo held. If Jihoon were in his right mind, he thinks, he’d recognize his habit of nervous exaggeration. “The rule, if I’ve got this right, is that since Jeonghan issued the challenge, he can select his own champion. But it’s not specified that he has to name his mate, is it, or even that it has to be a Vulcan. Or so he told me, when we agreed. He’s going to name me tomorrow, Jihoon, since he’s not allowed to fight for himself. I talked him out of his first choice already. Better me than Seungcheol, right? I don’t think you want the _Vela_ to be without her first officer and her captain, too. We can spare a helmsman, Chan knows what to do.”

“Do you think I can simply choose not to fight because I do not want to hurt you?” But Jihoon studies the weapon in his grasp and lays it down, so careful and controlled that there’s no ring of metal against the stone floor. “You have made a rash decision. I can only take what time remains and persuade Jeonghan to choose otherwise.”

“But he won’t. He doesn’t want you anymore, and you don’t want him.” It feels as if his own body is turning inward, pulling tight to a center of mass in his gut. He’s almost proud of the steadiness he maintains. Never has he wanted so badly to be dignified under pressure. He wants Jihoon to remember him well. “I hope you can forgive me. I’ll be here for you, whatever you decide. Thing is, I know how I’d fight. I’ve taken this seriously, I have all my arguments planned out. The climate is a disadvantage, so we’ll fight indoors. The _lirpa_ is too heavy for me, and you don’t have my experience with the rapier, so I’ll ask for hand to hand combat. Sure, I’ll remain at a disadvantage, but that’s why I should get to name the terms—”

“You could die.” Jihoon is so fast when he wants to be. It takes all the strength in his thighs lunging backwards to avoid the whistling blow past his ear. Impressive, he’s almost flattered that Jihoon launched himself from the ground for that, but he’s probably not in any mood to hear it. 

“Well there’s another option.” He sweeps a testing roundhouse, the length of his reach among his few advantages. Jihoon, unsurprisingly, seizes his calf and rolls them, the stone jarring Mingyu’s hip and ribs and winding him. But Jihoon is shoving away as if scalded, cracking open a fresh chasm between them. Sucking in an saw-toothed breath, Mingyu rolls back up to his feet. “What do you think it means, that I’m here?”

Like some tightly coiled cat, Jihoon begins to pace a circle around him. The light melts and shifts over the planes of his face. “That you exhibit a streak of self-sacrifice contrary to the better instincts of your biology,” he rasps.

He tilts his head with cockiness he doesn’t feel. “So you do know what I’m offering.”

“You have said as much.”

“No, you know.” He swallows. Gestures to the whole of himself in one jerky motion. “I’m asking you again.”

Truth be told, Mingyu isn’t putting up a fight when he goes down, rolling up to take the impact in his shoulders instead of the back of his head. Jihoon’s knee pins his chest and his hand fists in Mingyu’s hair. He’s had very good dreams that started along this theme, but he’s not proud. “This is the second time you have offered yourself to be used without considering the consequences.” Jihoon’s breath is a rasp and Mingyu’s dick isn’t going to stay calm much longer, so much for easing into things.

“Jeonghan says _pon farr_ only comes every seven years, after it starts. You’ll have time to make a better choice. But I’m looking over your options.” He can’t quite swallow, but he hooks his stinging chin up and elongates the line of his throat. “You can fight me or you can fuck me. I’m not scared of getting hurt, I think you know that, but I don’t— I don’t want my friend to have to live with himself if it all goes wrong. I don’t want you to win just so you can go to bed with someone who doesn’t love you.”

Very precisely, Jihoon’s free hand closes over his throat. “You would prefer if I used my friend.” There is no pressure, not quite, just warmth. He isn’t afraid. This, he realizes with dizzying clarity, is where Jihoon held the blood inside his body. “And still you do not consider the consequences.”

“A more profound bond.” His voices buzzes under Jihoon’s fingers. “ I’m sorry. This isn’t how I wanted to do this.” Jihoon’s face is close to his own now. _Please_ he thinks with all his might, and fits his fingertips as Jeonghan showed him. Along Jihoon’s jaw, his temple. He watches Jihoon stare down at him in brittle comprehension and there’s no more room for apologizing. He fumbles to drag the hand at his throat up to his cheek.

Slowly, Jihoon shifts his weight, knees bracketing Mingyu’s ribs. That flush spills all the way down his chest. He’s not unmoved, the weight of him blood hot and thickening against Mingyu’s diaphragm. 

“You did not want this.” His lips scarcely move. The fist in Mingyu’s hair slackens, shifting to the stone, and uncertain fingertips stroke the thin skin beneath Mingyu’s eye, the pulsing vein at his temple. “Not with me.”

“And I’ll apologize again for that. But it’s your turn to tell the truth,” he fires back. “How did you know when I hurt myself?”

The clench of Jihoon’s legs around him stutters his breath. “I cannot answer this.” 

“Then show me. Please,” he whispers, and Jihoon drops into his mind like a stone. 

This is not the clinical rifling through his compartments of self that Jeonghan demonstrated. Jihoon upends him. His entire life is shuffled out of order, blazing fresh all at once, until he realizes the memories overlaid like a thousand glass slides in brilliant color are not all his own.

He is standing in a club bathed in blue and artificial starlight, and he is watching a man drink alone. He is watching a man smile drunk and radiant as he describes a city by the sea, and he is unmanned so simply, when a beautiful stranger who is now his subordinate pillows his cheek on his arms, drowsy, and says _I’d like to be your friend._ Beauty is subjective, better he should say well-proportioned or symmetrical, healthy, robust. He thinks, more forcefully, _beautiful._

He is fucking Minghao for the last time, and even in the moment he knows it’s the last, his last chance to make him feel good, to be the person who makes him happy. They don’t have anything to say to each other, and Mingyu is inside him but he feels adrift from everything and everyone he’s ever known. Minghao sleepily kisses his shoulder after, and rolls onto his side, and Mingyu watches the notches of his spine in the dim until the sun rises.

He is trailing behind Seungcheol and Wonwoo, unhurried, completing their trine. The campus is summer green, shadows lush and deep with dusk, and they are all impatient to leave and fulfill their first assignments on the _Antares._ Seungcheol is pleased they were lucky enough to serve together. Jihoon and Wonwoo know that luck had nothing to do with it, but they see no cause to correct him. Seungcheol wants to see the cadets fencing, a recreation to blow off steam after weeks of examinations. Later, Jihoon will ask _who is that_ of the tall swordsman, the one laughing and rolling his shoulders before a bout. A sehlat is like this, liquid in its motions. Powerful, but eager for a gentle hand. Seungcheol, once of the warm, curious kisses but now held at a professional distance, says _I don’t know._ Always eager to please, adding _do you want me to ask?_

He is Jihoon and he is Jihoon watching Mingyu watch him, Mingyu doesn’t even remember this, when was this, the rec room is quiet and Jihoon is playing the piano as he very rarely does, and Mingyu asks for a song but he can’t quite remember how it goes, he’s humming along, badly, and the feeling of _Mingyu_ in Jihoon’s mind is like sunlight.

He is watching himself fencing with Seungcheol, calling out taunts, showing off. He is watching himself slide a hand up Wonwoo’s flank, from a vantage point at the medbay doors, and lean close to murmur something inviting in his ear. He is incandescent with Jihoon’s desire, his guilt and shame and confusion, because he has been a mindful student and there is no place for a Vulcan to be so ruled by the hunger he feels.

He is Mingyu and Jihoon is living his life in a thousand overlaid moments, he is wearing the shiny new shoes at his parents’ funeral and he is dancing out of range of his opponent’s foil with his heart in his throat, elated, and he is watching Jihoon and longing to reach out and take his hand. 

Here is Jihoon, meditating in the red lights of his cabin that he ought not call comforting, and electrocution feels like this, the white noise screech up his limbs, a harsh metallic taste coating his tongue. He is running to Mingyu before he can articulate why, or what he will say when he reaches him. He is extending a hand as he realizes a bond has been opened, without intention, and he means to show Mingyu what is too vast to say, what no Vulcan would ever say aloud. _This was never meant to happen,_ he means to confess in the meld, _but you are not a mistake. Not to me. I am yours, if you will have me._

(Here is a feeling like a bruise, the months he was a dutiful student and chose not to feel what would have hampered his duties to his ship and crew. He could not be the first to struggle to sever an attachment, but such things were never spoken of in polite company. He could not ask his mothers, how can I be a stranger to this man again, so that I may then be his friend, and want for nothing.)

He is Jihoon and he is reading a book he knows anew through Mingyu’s eyes, crowded with footnotes and regrets, and he is on a ship surrounded by beautiful and brilliant officers who all chose the unknown, who wanted the rush and elation of discovery. They are brave, and Mingyu is pulled between two equal and opposing forces, an impossible course to navigate. To not waste this time, not to swallow down what he might never have the chance to say again— and clear, carved out from a cavern he didn’t know existed, _I don’t know how to make people stay._

For the first time, Jihoon regards him fully, parting the crush and the noise like a curtain as their brows rest heavily together, their bodies so far away. 

“I have always been yours for the asking,” Jihoon’s voice echoes, as if it were his own, resounding in unison. Though he eases his hand from Mingyu’s face, the connection remains, humming electric bright and alive. When he kisses Mingyu his lips buzz.

The air is acrid with smoke on Tarsus IV, lit up by phaser fire against the dark, and Jihoon is holding Mingyu against his shoulder and bearing down a finger’s width below his artery. He is watching Mingyu receive his transfusion in med bay, and he is thinking impossible things, like how it must feel when a star detonates. Surak has taught him, everyone he has ever respected has taught him, fear can only be conquered by surrendering, rationally, to what one cannot control. Mingyu is not his to lose. He is human, and even if his life ends in quiet and old age, Jihoon will live a century more with his memory.

He begins to feel the fever, and in his hubris he refuses to accept what he already knows. It is not Jeonghan who will make his blood burn. 

Mingyu’s face is hopeful when he asks, _so you think I wouldn’t be a good captain?_ And Jihoon, who knows metaphor to be a kind of falsehood, who knows that only logic is grace, wants to tell him _I would be your weapon. I cannot lie to you. I would follow you. There is nothing you could not ask of me. You are too good to see your own power._

Wonwoo is inspecting the healing graft at Mingyu’s shoulder, and his palm is lingering absently at the nape of Mingyu’s neck, fondly ruffling his hair, the intimacy evident, and futile rage is crashing over Jihoon’s head like a wave. He is trying to remove himself and Wonwoo is catching him by the arm and he is staring at one of his dearest friends on the ground, in pain, understanding that he put him there.

In a room of stone, Mingyu wants to speak, but his mouth is flooded with fire. His eyes are burning, his fingertips like embers, the grit of stone electric against his shoulders, his ass, his uniform gone without his memory. Jihoon is butting his cheek into his chest, rubbing as if he could scent him, trailing bites like pinpricks, but he looks up as if summoned. 

_I did this to you,_ he thinks, and feels again the weight of Jihoon in his mind. Not so frantic as before, but overpowering still. Like a dragon coiled around his hoard.

 _It is true that you are mine._ Jihoon’s amusement is hot-edged, spiked. _As I am yours._ He sits over Mingyu’s waist again, offering no relief for the ache of his cock, straining and untouched. Jihoon draws up his wrist gently and grazes his lips over the creases of his palm, all whole and unbroken. Kisses Mingyu’s fingertips, one by one, eyes hot as he stares down at him. Returns to his middle finger and draws it into his mouth, sinks down. A flicker of fond mean pleasure at the noise Mingyu makes, hips jerking up into nothing, and then he’s pursing his lips and sucking, dragging up his ring, Minghao’s ring, and holding it on his tongue a moment before he places it deliberately over Mingyu’s shoulder, out of sight.

“It is only us, tonight,” Jihoon says deliberately. Then frowns, despite the haze of heat. Mingyu doesn’t know how to raise his defenses, can only wrap his arms around Jihoon’s waist. “You were involved with Ensign Rhee. You did not tell me this.”

 _I can’t,_ Mingyu begs, can’t think of her taking down her hair or jostling his shoulder, friendly and familiar, before getting dressed, can’t think of her dying alone. And Jihoon folds down around him, hooking his chin over Mingyu’s shoulder until the shaking stops.

How Jihoon bore this fever he can’t imagine. It rises again like the tide, urgent, Jihoon pinching him when he shifts too much so he doesn’t scrape his skin raw on the stone. Mingyu can hardly track the time. Here Jihoon unfolds a blanket from the cot along the wall, here Mingyu follows the tug on his arm, mouth watering, skin tightening as he watches Jihoon’s blood dark cock against his skin, copious, weeping slick coating him that no medical journal ever bothered to mention. 

Jihoon bites his hipbones and Mingyu can’t reach to bite him back, can only keen and grip his hair as he’s jacked in a vicious fist. Jihoon’s arousal is suffocating, his desire to see Mingyu undone, eyes rapt when Mingyu throws his head back and pulses ropes of white up his belly, his chest. Very distantly, he is aware that Jeonghan has known Jihoon’s hands. That before, when he could afford the luxury of surrender, Seungcheol knew them, too. 

His orgasm is still pulsing down his arms and legs but he hasn’t softened, gulping something too much like a whimper when Jihoon’s tight grip resumes stroking. His arm bars Mingyu’s hips. _My fever is yours,_ Jihoon confirms, shaded too smug to really sound apologetic. _Tomorrow, when you are clean, even when you cannot support your own weight and your hands tremble, you will hold yourself open for me and beg._

The meld is like clean water, nothing obscured. He can’t stop the spill of his thoughts, the whimper in his chest as Jihoon jacks him near release again, the echoes as Jihoon feels his hot sparks of pleasure and oversensitivity as if they were his own. _There’s nothing you could do to me that I wouldn’t want,_ is the formless notion, not quite correct but it feels right in his gut, summons vivid images he doesn’t intend. Jihoon is lapping at the slit of his cock, his lashes lowered, pale slender hand twisting tight circles at the base. No sooner does he focus on the flex of knuckles under skin than he thinks how that fist would feel inside him, and comes again with a shout, shoulders hitching up from the blanket as Jihoon envelops him in wet heat, swallowing hard until he claws at his scalp for relief.

When he comes down, Jihoon has flattened one hand across his clenched and shivering belly. He sucks the plumped and sticky head again, just once, sharp, as if to prompt him. He doesn’t mean to think this, but Jihoon’s narrow pleased eyes are unrelenting. Already he wants Jihoon inside him, his thighs still trembling, and he’s ashamed but can’t stave off thoughts of something so huge he’ll be able to feel it from the outside. 

“That may be arranged,” Jihoon says roughly. But he anchors his hand and crawls up the side of Mingyu’s body again. “When you are comfortable parsing what is desired in reality and what is imagined, I will see that you may do so safely,” Nearly calm he sounds, rubbing himself off in hot streaks of slick along Mingyu’s flank, hungry for skin on skin, palm curled tight and demanding in the dip of his waist, but his mind is open, unbarred. It is Jihoon picturing Mingyu on his belly, the most intimate part of him swollen soft and open and claimed, how he might keen if Jihoon kissed him there.

The ferocious echoes of Jihoon’s orgasm slam him over the edge again, fumbling into the loose cradle of his own hand, stinging to touch and only now beginning to soften. 

“No part of you is hidden from me.” Jihoon sounds like himself again, crisp. He suffers Mingyu to haul him closer and kiss him, wet and open, still shivering with afterimages. “Nor would I wish to conceal myself, from you.”

“ _Nor,_ ” Mingyu marvels, skating a hand up the back of his thigh. “You came like that and you can still say _nor_?”

“The fever will return in force.” There, the almost twitch, the almost eyeroll. Jihoon allows a small, private smile at his delight. “I will be incoherent enough for your ego tomorrow.”

Instead of something inviting, Mingyu says, “I wanted to be better. For you.”

Of course Jihoon doesn’t misunderstand. “What an illogical notion,” he murmurs, and catches Mingyu’s shoulder between his teeth before tugging and drawing what he can of the blanket over them both, sticky skin and all. “As I was already yours.”

  
  
  


In the morning a bar of sunlight creeps across the floor to sting his eyes. The cot sags under his weigh and his mouth tastes sour and dry. 

Jihoon is dressing, but he pauses with his uniform in hand when Mingyu sways to sit upright. “I will not be gone long. Explanations must be made. The contract is dissolved.” 

“I’ll come with you,” Mingyu says, or tries to, interrupted by a jaw-cracking yawn. He can’t peer into Jihoon’s mind like a clear lake, not just now, but he feels the warm hum of him all the same.

“No.” Jihoon straightens his uniform, clean sky blue, and presses Mingyu’s shoulder before he can rise. He smells, a little bit. Mingyu is probably worse. But Jihoon cradles his jaw and dips down to kiss him all the same, stale breath and all. “No. You have done enough,” he murmurs in the humid space between them, then steals another kiss as if he can’t help himself, or doesn’t want to try. “Rest. Let me do this for you.”

  
  
  


He soaks in a narrow bath and Jihoon stands behind him and washes his hair, cutting the air with something herbal and fragrant. The fever is building again, a banked fire of undeniable urgency, and he allows Mingyu to reach back and hold him like a lifeline. The pads of his fingers rub deeper into his scalp, strained, when Mingyu hooks a knee over one side of the metal tub and cleans himself with single-minded intensity, panting and rocking onto his own fingertip until Jihoon yanks him back by his hair and sucks his tongue, hard.

“Be patient,” he warns, but the brief touch of their noses in parting is— Mingyu is still learning the words, for how that makes him feel. “I have a question for you.” He slaps Mingyu’s thigh, ignoring his moan like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, and cradles his head as he lowers him back to the water.

“No, my hair didn’t really need to be washed, but I won’t tell people that you did something illogical.”

“Get up,” Jihoon sighs, tugging his ear, and hands him a towel. The water rushes out to be purified, and the basin fills again at the touch of his hand. Unbidden, he reaches out to feel the weight of Jihoon’s cock in his hand, thickened with interest but not yet aching urgently. 

“It will not always be like this,” Jihoon tells him, brows lowering, but he answers in kind, fingertips trailing from crown to base and back again. Traces the crease of his hip, up to the droplets caught on his ribs. There are many kinds of worship, Mingyu thinks. “There are very few recorded unions between Vulcans and humans. Your race would call mine prudish and cold, and what is said of humans is another matter entirely.”

“Good thing I know you better, then.” Jihoon sinks into the shallow, steaming bath before they grow distracted. “You wanted to ask me something.”

“Yes.” Jihoon slicks back his wet hair, eyelashes damp, and Mingyu permits himself to gently trace the fae point of one ear. Soon, he’ll need him again soon. He can’t pull his hand away. “How did you know?” His eyes are open and curious. “What Jeonghan was planning. There was little evidence for your deduction.”

Water gushes over the sides of the tub when Mingyu sinks down over his thighs. There must be a drain somewhere, but he doesn’t really care. He has to kiss Jihoon’s sternum, holding his breath to press his lips hard and meaningful beneath the surface of the water, here where the human liver would be, where Jihoon’s heart pulses steady beneath his skin. 

“It wasn’t a guess.” He holds still for Jihoon to lick up the line of his jaw. “If he did all this for J’soo, he wouldn’t risk losing him. Or maybe it was faith. I know you don’t like that answer.” His breath is roughening again. He steals Jihoon's hand and sucks the herbal soap taste from each fingertip, satisfies himself with how he can feel his cock jumping between them, a satin glide against his skin. He wonders if he could make him come like that, gagging on his fingers. He'll have to see if Jihoon blushes when he can read his thoughts again. 

“Explain.”

“That he didn’t hate you. That he wasn’t doing this out of spite. He just found someone he couldn’t live without.” 

Later, in the meld, he thinks Jihoon loves his mind, too. As inextricably part of him as the long thighs bruised by Jihoon’s teeth, or the hands Jihoon kisses again and again as if learning a map by touch. Loves his rapidfire deductions and silvery, implausible intuitive connections.

 _This pleases me,_ Jihoon reflects. _To see you regard yourself as I do._

  
  
  


The quarters discreetly provided are better equipped for visitors, not Vulcan ascetics. There’s a real bed, incense burning, food on a covered tray. No more than eight paces in either direction, but it feels as if an entire galaxy fits inside. In Jihoon, glowing by candlelight, feeding himself and Mingyu cool broth in turns, pressing slices of a tangy purple fruit to his mouth with hot-eyed intention. When he watches Mingyu swallow the air seems to crackle.

“Are people scandalized?” he teases, dizzy, only his sore muscles reassuring him that this isn't a dream. The halls have been politely deserted, in their short transit across the temple grounds. He hasn't seen another soul since Jihoon laid hands on him, like their messy spectacle can't be borne by civilized Vulcans. Jihoon made him call Seungcheol directly, though, confirming his soundness of body and mind. 

“I do not care,” Jihoon laughs, in that stuttered way of his, more breath than sound, and he holds Mingyu down on the hard bed, allows him a struggle. Every strain is a pulse in his cock, his own reaction dragging sympathetic ripples of arousal from Jihoon. His shoulders pull, his forearms cord, and Jihoon watches him ravenously. 

“I am going to take you now,” Jihoon says, as if it wasn’t already obvious, just for Mingyu’s snarl of impatience. He gives it to him on his belly, chest pinned to the bed by a hand between his shoulderblades and force like a cinderblock. He only needs the one hand, anyway, to hold Mingyu where he wants him. He fucks through his body’s resistance like nothing, slick easing the way as his thick cock overpowers the burn of muscle. It's like fireworks, his helpless clenching mirrored back to him, lighting Jihoon's spine on fire with every squeeze and shiver.

And he’s in Mingyu’s mind, as warm and reverent as his pace is brutal, worshipful when he sobs into the sheets. Something more than exhaustion crumples his thighs when he comes, and Jihoon moves him like a doll, turned onto his side, one thigh pulled up to his chest before he pistons into him again, finding new soft places to open up. 

A distant, animal part of him still flinches to retreat. Jihoon, anyone but Jihoon can see him like this, with drool on his chin, desperate, keening eagerly when Jihoon drags him onto his back again and pushes his knees up to his shoulders, watching the way his cock saws in and out of Mingyu with rapt attention, because he wants to share the view. Transfixed by his red-bitten mouth and shaking thighs and the needy flex of his belly as he's filled, his leaking cock heavy. How it feels, how it _feels,_ soft wet heat clutching him, yielding everything. Here, the slow snag when he pulls himself out and here the shallow thrust forward to breach him, teasing drags that allow him to catch his breath before Jihoon, flushed dark with wanting, holds his gaze and grinds up against his prostate again, shivering in sympathy as Mingyu’s reaction feels like his own. 

“Cheating,” Mingyu bites out, and Jihoon kisses his scabbed over chin fondly. 

“Always.” 

Three times Mingyu is wrung out and twice Jihoon spills inside him without ceasing, hammering through every orgasm until he screams, fingertips scrabbling for purchase in Jihoon’s skin, legs crossing and trapping him deep before he gets any ideas about slipping away. 

When the bedframe splinters and cracks beneath them, Jihoon pauses only a heartbeat to ascertain that Mingyu is not injured before he spears him on the floor, rug soft against his back, tugging Mingyu’s sore sticky cock as he pumps him full again.

“You’re enjoying this,” Mingyu shudders, palms flat against the wall as instructed as Jihoon fingers the come out of him over a wash basin. He’s just going to fill him up again, that much is clear in his thoughts, but he likes the sulky shyness it inspires in Mingyu, watching streaks of thick translucent semen trail down his thighs, over Jihoon’s hand as he toys with his sore rim.

“That would be stating the obvious.” Jihoon bites his ass, hard, before his patient fingers crook up, rhythm already confident on the swollen bundle of nerves he wants. All warm glow satisfaction in the meld as he watches Mingyu’s thighs begin to tremble. “I will not often have the time or opportunity to supply your fantasies of being held down and bred.”

“You don’t have to keep saying it,” Mingyu knocks his brow against the wall for relief, hips canting out helplessly. “I liked you shy.”

“I am not shy.” Jihoon milks him harder, the air stinging Mingyu’s cock as he stiffens. “And you hope I will never stop. Which I must inform you is not possible, for many reasons.”

The fever is calm, for now, a fire burning too far to singe. Mingyu laughs through a realization, a plucked string in the bond. “You’re _jealous._ ”

The open palmed slap across his ass curls his toes. Rude, if Jihoon’s thoughts and his own weren’t all one tangle. Did Jihoon ever spank Seungcheol? He doesn’t mean to look, but that’s one hell of an answer.

“It is logical,” Jihoon stands, pressing up close as the position affords his wrist more punishing leverage. “I am demonstrating my fitness to meet your needs.”

He’s joking, but— “Jihoon.”

A pause, and a fleeting nip to his shoulder, apologetic. “I know. Because it is me. Because it is you. This is different. I have told you this before.” The echo in Jihoon’s mind is unbidden: _I don’t know how to make people stay._ But he doesn’t make Mingyu repeat his fears. 

Before he sleeps, he feeds him honey.

  
  
  


If he were so inclined, Mingyu could calculate the distance from where he sits against the wall to the place where he was born, where the ocean was cold and glittering and full of more secrets than he could learn in a lifetime. He doesn’t. 

His hands are vast around Jihoon’s waist, his mouth a welcome for Jihoon to make himself at home. The fever is fading, he thinks. Exhaustion quakes in his bruised thighs, the deep used ache that travels up his spine and knots his lower back, bone deep fatigue and relief all at once. There’s only the two of them, skin twitching with eagerness as Jihoon begins to sink down. His face is tight and controlled, adjusting to the stretch, but the bond is alight and Mingyu feels surrounded and full, cock jerking at how Jihoon feels split open, like Mingyu is massive, which is an exaggeration but flattering regardless. 

Huffing, Jihoon rocks down, taking him to the hilt and pinching his nipple so hard he gulps for air.

“You are congratulating yourself for an endowment over which you have no control,” he scolds, even as his hand is gentler, stroking his nape as he buries his face in Jihoon’s neck, trembling not to move. He’s not supposed to move. 

Bit by bit Jihoon adjusts, easing up an inch and back again. He’s unhurried, luxuriating in Mingyu’s pleasure. Already he knows he’s going to test how long Mingyu can last, and then praise him, because humans enjoy excessive compliments and it costs Jihoon nothing to offer them.

Bold, his chest a furnace, Mingyu thinks he could care less about size, just so long as he’s the best Jihoon ever had.

Jihoon stills, catching him by the jaw. He pushes his fingers over Mingyu’s mouth needlessly, when he hasn’t spoken a word.

“There is no competition,” he says gravely. _T’hy’la,_ he thinks, and Mingyu knows the feeling of this word at once, as if the language were his own. Every association: the clasp of hands and Mingyu’s shared laughing look on the bridge for Jihoon alone; regarding each other in med bay, Jihoon small and shamed, staring at the bandage where Mingyu’s life tried to bleed out. Staring out across a pink horizon. In a starry blue bar where Mingyu forgot to be afraid and asked, can we skip to the part where you know me, and I know you.

 _Even if you never spoke to me again,_ Jihoon repeats with intent, kissing him and closing the circuit, their bodies so tightly joined they might learn to become one animal, one mind never parted. _Even if I did not see you for fifty years._

_My brother._

_My lover._

_My friend._

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> all my thanks! to ayesha and taz for feedback, brainstorming, consolation and encouragement, to leesa and len for reading this fic in its initial roughshod form and being so kind, to em for being so patient, and to all the hags for moral support, sprints, and good old fashioned venting <3
> 
> devastating art of our posthumously promoted admiral son hyunwoo [here](https://twitter.com/lavenderim/status/1229467268280504325)
> 
> > [a brief playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2980hEk6WfQTmp317SKeov?si=WbOqWcvoSGenuytV-qSc5w)  
> > [twitter](https://twitter.com/hyb_jabbers)  
> > [curiouscat](https://curiouscat.me/taeminsgucci)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [City of Stars (the voyages remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29180796) by [nasaplates](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nasaplates/pseuds/nasaplates)




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